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Federal Way, WA

During the off-season, I had a few yards of Tagro delivered to help build some soil mass; it's been sitting atop the patch for a few months now. I finally got out there yesterday to begin tilling the mixture and within minutes, I had, literally, thousands and thousands of very small, yellow-ish bugs crawling across my shoes and up my legs. As soon as I noticed, I took a closer look at the soil and saw that it was completely covered by these little running creatures everywhere! I've never seen 'em before and I want to know if they'll be harmful to my plants, aside from simply being incredibly disturbing to work near and making it impossible to spend more than five seconds atop the dirt, heh. Here's a picture I got of my shoe...after it'd been sitting away from the dirt for an hour; all of the white things are bugs: [IMG]http://oi60.tinypic.com/2vbty51.jpg[/IMG]
If the image doesn't load: http://oi60.tinypic.com/2vbty51.jpg

5/3/2014 12:36:27 PM

Ohio

Look like nats to me, they love damp decaying food/ materials, if it was me I would do a light soil drench of Merit, you should be good to go.

5/4/2014 10:18:20 AM

Ohio

*gnat

5/4/2014 10:21:30 AM

Princeton Kentucky

Yes, Looks Like maybe Gnat larva or just soils mites. A safe way to knock them out if they are mites is to put a couple drops of dish detergent into a 1 liter bottle and spray or lightly poor it on them and you will add a bit of "P" to the soil at the same time. Good Luck Heres a good link for Bug I.D. Click on Guide to look for different pest classifications.
http://bugguide.net/node/view/15740

5/4/2014 10:25:29 AM

Federal Way, WA

Thanks guys! I appreciate the info. Will do with both the Merit and dish soap...anything for the future plants, heh.

5/4/2014 2:33:51 PM

Bethlehem CT

Last year I transplanted melon seedlings under a row cover. A couple days later I pulled the row cover back to see how the young transplants were doing. The melons were covered with these tiny black almost microscopic insects. That resembled the ones your picture shows. Half of the melon plants were dead already and the remaining ones were just clinging to life. I had to pull the row cover off and spray the young seedlings to save the crop. I left the row cover off after that and the problem went away. I had never seen those insects before and I was never able to get an ID on them.

5/5/2014 11:47:41 AM