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pests Tiny black pests and ants?!

T

Towlieee

Growing on a 3rd floor balcony, my plants started on a first floor for a few weeks before we moved to a new place....  Just today I noticed 5 tiny ants on my watermelons that are in a storage tote, and then when inspecting my Jalapeno, I noticed the tiniest of tiny little black bugs, I saw 3 of them walking on the soil.....   

Could these be aphids?  Or mites?  Or something of the sort?  I wanted to take a pic, but my camera phone wouldn't show them....  I inspected the bottom of a few of the leaves on the bells and jalaps and didn't see anything....

What would be the best remedy?  All I am growing is 2 melon plants in about 40 gallons of soil, a Jalapeno plant in around 3.5 gallons, and a pair of baby red bell peppers in around 4-4.5 gallons of soil, I plan to overwinter the bells and jalaps
Doing research on here and google as I type this out, just unsure of what I have.  I didn't expect ants to make it to my 3rd floor balcony!  

edit:  My plants look great and are growing like "weeds", but if I have an infestation, I want to stop it asap! 
 
If you are on the third floor balcony ants might be friends not foe. Idk how many bees are going to fly up there to try n find pollen but ya never know. Anyways ants are responsible for pollinating flowers almost as much as bees. They will crawl on the flowers and stir up the pollen unintentionally helping to pollinate the flowers.

To be honest I haven't had a problem with ants but once. I'm sure if they were like those leaf cutting ants it could be bad but you'll likely be just fine. Sometimes we over think things and screw ourselves in the end.

Anyways if you want to get rid of them mix 50/50 powdered sugar with borax and make a paste with water. Put it in something like a soda bottle lids at the base of the plant. They can't separate the fine powders because its too small and after they eat will carry it back to the nest poisoning the others. Actually if you don't like the borax idea you could swap it with baking soda. Ants stomachs are acidic and it makes them gassy.. Then ants can't fart so they basically explode and die.

Regardless of what you decide to do after reading my ramblings enjoy the rest of your grow!


Mike
 
Thanks for the information.  I did have a humming bird feeder hung up, and noticed that some of the sugar water was dropping onto a couple of my melon vines, plus it attracted lots of wasps so I just took that down recently, the sugar probably brought the ants from far away!  

I'm hand pollinating my melons, as some just recently popped up, I think 3 of them took to the hand pollination and are growing.  On pepper plants I was under the impression that they pollinate themselves?  Since only one of my bell plants is producing (5 decent sized bells right now), I've been shaking all 3 of my pepper plants to promote pollination.  I definitely haven't seen a single bee up on my balcony, I was hoping to have bee's and not those pricks known as wasps haha.

My peppers have tons of flowers on them, I'm fine if they want to wait a little bit before producing, it has been in the low to high 90's all last week.  The plants themselves are growing like weeds, explosive growth, they only get about 4.5 hours of direct sunlight daily, but I have a bunch of CFL's on them from all angles from 6am to 10pm (just with a 4.5 hour break when they get sunlight)
 
Towlieee said:
I'm hand pollinating my melons, as some just recently popped up, I think 3 of them took to the hand pollination and are growing.  On pepper plants I was under the impression that they pollinate themselves?  Since only one of my bell plants is producing (5 decent sized bells right now), I've been shaking all 3 of my pepper plants to promote pollination.  I definitely haven't seen a single bee up on my balcony, I was hoping to have bee's and not those pricks known as wasps haha.
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Peppers can and do pollinate themselves but not with a particularly great frequency. If you want a good yield, I would still recommend hand pollinating them too.
 
JoynersHotPeppers said:
Can the little black things fly? Fungal gnats will talk on the soil and are black and small. 
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I didn't see wings, they looked almost the size of gnats, they were SUPER tiny.  I'll look more thoroughly at my plants today.  

I had a single lady bug and a spider living in my Jalapeno container, but it got knocked over a couple weeks ago and they left, guess they don't like earthquakes, lol. 
I miss the lady bug and spider, they were my security guards ;)
 
Towlieee said:
I didn't see wings, they looked almost the size of gnats, they were SUPER tiny.  I'll look more thoroughly at my plants today.  

I had a single lady bug and a spider living in my Jalapeno container, but it got knocked over a couple weeks ago and they left, guess they don't like earthquakes, lol. 
I miss the lady bug and spider, they were my security guards ;)
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Babies start in the soil eating roots before they gain wings to fly away. Prior to wings once they emerge from soil they do walk around the top layer. 
 
Best of luck!
 
So I found a new makeup brush of my girls, would this be fine for hand pollinating my pepper plants?  And the females and males are both in the same flower right, so just swirl it around or something like that in there?  

My peppers are growing like weeds, exploding with growth, just not producing!  Most the melons I polinated by ripping off the male flowers and rubbing them in the females seem to be growing
 
 
 
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JoynersHotPeppers said:
Babies start in the soil eating roots before they gain wings to fly away. Prior to wings once they emerge from soil they do walk around the top layer. 
 
Best of luck!
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So I was closely checking my 2 pepper buckets just now, and noticed a good amount of tiny flying black insects, they weren't really flying "far" away, just flying around the base of the Jalapeno...

I haven't spotted any in my bell pepper bucket, and the two 5 gallon buckets sit touching each other almost constantly.  My Jalapeno plant looks healthy as can be, strong as an ox!  It's a miniature bush with tons of dark green leaves, and about 30+ open flowers (and more on the way).  
 
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