Prayer plant flower

My prayer plant has been flowering continuously all summer. The flowers are about 1 cm. (3/8 in.) long.

Maranata leuconeura

A houseplant guide site claims the flowers are "insignificant". I beg to disagree.

The prayer plant is a tropical rainforest native, so it likes water and heat. I have to remember to water it at least every second day, or it starts looking dejected.

I put a couple of stems outside in water for the summer; one of them grew a crop of new leaves and a sturdy root system. The other, in a more protected spot, barely made it. Now, with the beginning of fall, I've brought both inside.

Rainy day surprise

My prayer plant is blooming!

First flower, and a bud.

The tiny (1 cm.) flower lasted only a day, but the next bud is getting ready to open in the morning, and there are two new buds coming along. A nice treat for a rainy, stormy weekend!

Upside-down flower

Early this spring, I bought a small cyclamen plant for my front window. I had never grown cyclamen before, but the flowers were pretty, and red, and nothing else in the store was in bloom yet.

Silky, flowing, backwards petals.

It bloomed all spring, then produced a good crop of round seed pods, and shut down. But it likes my window, and a month later, up came the flowers again, for the rest of the summer.

Luscious colours

More seed pods followed. As soon as they were ripe, more flower buds appeared in the centre of the plant.

While flowering, florists' cyclamens should be kept below 20 °C (68 °F), with the night time temperatures preferably between 6.5 °C to 15 °C (44 °F to 59 °F). Temperatures above 20 °C (68 °F) may induce the plant to go dormant. (Wikipedia)

So we share a fondness for cool weather; I keep my windows open until it snows.

The latest bud, and interesting leaves.

The flower opens downward, and may be self-pollinating.

Some species are frost-hardy. I'll have to try growing some outside for the grey months.

Wax, feces, dish detergent, and a baby scale

My Schefflera was harbouring scale bugs again. I had cleaned them off in January and the plant did fine all year, but now that the heater comes on occasionally, and the light is lower, here they are back again.

This time I didn't wait until the leaves were falling off. (Well, one or two did.) When I saw the plant shiny and sticky with leaked sap, I checked, and found the scales.

This time, I removed the plant immediately to the shower, where I sprayed it well with household cleaner, then washed that off with a strong, lukewarm shower. Then I drizzled the whole plant well with dishwashing detergent and left it to soak. After about 15 minutes, I showered it again.

When it was dry, I brought it back to the light and inspected it, finding about a dozen scale bugs, which all appeared to be dead when I inspected them under the microscope.

Large scale bug, about 1 to 1.5 mm long, upside down, and apparently dessicated.

They like to settle along the veins of the leaf and on tender parts of the stems.

Scar, where the bug has been washed off, leaving a ring of waxy strings.

The mother scale bugs shelter their eggs and young under their wax and feces coating, even after they have died. How about these? Did the detergent get under those umbrellas? Were there future scales in there? I flipped all that I'd removed entire on their backs and examined them. In one which looked as dead as all the rest, a hint of motion caught my attention. It was a baby, waving four little legs in the air, transparent, short legs, like blond hair with elbows. The only one; all the rest had been washed away.

Last January, I wondered about those "eye" spots, so visible in the top photo. Someone was asking about them on BugGuide, too, and not getting an answer. I wandered off down the web, and found a USDA site dealing with scale bugs. Down through the halls: Scale insects -- soft scales -- to a page with the anatomy of 46 species of scale bugs. Mine turned out to be Coccus hesperidium, the brown scale. On its page, there's a detailed description and a drawing with definitions of the parts. There is no mention of eyes or eye spots.

What there is, in abundance, are pores. Large pores and micro-pores, and double pores. Some excrete wax, some the honeydew that coats the leaves. Two of those could be what looks like eyes. I've left a question at BugGuide about it.

And it seems that this method, a warm, soapy shower and soak, actually works. A lot more fun that scraping lumps off sticky leaves, too. But I'll still need to check for newborns next week. The plant looks fine.

Scales, honeydew, and a good bath.

The leaves were falling off my Schefflera houseplant. Just a few, at first; I picked them up and thought nothing of it. Then, last week, there were more every day. Saturday, I finally got around to really looking at the plant, and discovered that it was covered with scale insects and their excretions.

A plague on all their houses!

A closer view. Scales, sticky sap, bubbles of honeydew.

These are soft scale insects, Coccidae, feeding on the plant juices, gradually killing their host. They don't look like insects; all that's visible is a shell glued to the stem or veins of the plant, like a limpet to a rock. But the limpet wanders about; these do not.

They are probably all females; some species reproduce by parthenogenesis, without the need for a male. In other species, the males live for only a short time; they do not feed.

Female scale insects attach themselves to a handy location, and settle down to eat and lay eggs, 1000 or more in a season. They cover themselves and their eggs with a thin coat of wax and feces. As they feed, they excrete excess liquid through pores in various places; this is a sweet, sticky substance, called "honeydew". It covers the leaves and stems, attracting fungus spores and, on houseplants, dust.

Little bird from Chinatown apologizes for not eating the bugs.

I broke off the stems and leaves where the scale insects were thickest. Some of the scales fell off, so I collected them to get a better look at them.

Side view, showing the waxy cap, and the mass of eggs or young underneath.

When the female dies, her eggs remain protected underneath her dead body until they are ready to hatch.

The largest scale I found, just over 3 mm. (1/8 inch) long. She was dead, her babies long gone.

Several sizes and conditions. Upper left, on top of the pile, what looks like white wax emerges from a central rear pore. Extreme right, center, a dead, empty shell, upside-down.

Most of the scales that had fallen off seemed to be dead and empty, but as I examined them, one started to rock. Then a very tiny, almost transparent baby crawled out from underneath. As I watched, others joined her.

Medium -sized nymph, about 1.5 mm. long.

The tiniest crawler, half a millimeter long. If you look very closely you can see a hint of legs. She could move at a pretty good pace for her size.

I don't know if those two black spots in front are eyes. Someone asked about that on BugGuide, but got no answer.

Only the newly-hatched insects crawl about; once they've found a good feeding spot, they settle down. In some species, they lose their legs entirely.

And now it was time to rescue my poor plant. The leaves I had removed went into the garbage, sealed in a plastic bag. I put the Schefflera in the shower and hosed it down thoroughly with lukewarm water and lots of soap. I took off the top layer of soil and scrubbed the pot, too. When it dried, I checked it over and discovered a couple dozen more scales; these I squashed.

Tonight, the plant looked healthy, but I found another few small scales along the veins of leaves, and removed them. I will have to continue monitoring until I know all the nymphs are gone.

There's an excellent photo of one of these, by Scott Justis, on Flickr, here's Wikipedia on the scale insects, and the USDA Systematic Entomology Laboratory, has a good discussion of the Coccid family.