Dear Dan, I wrote in a while ago to see if you would do an article on root aphids but haven’t seen one. I believe these are more common than people think, especially soil growers. They hide on the ...

The yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus, farms root aphids for sugar (honeydew) and nitrogen (protein). In turn these species of aphids have developed distinctive traits never found in free living ...

Herbivorous insects, especially aphids, often form close ecological relationships with the plants upon which they feed. One consequence of this is that many species are structured into distinct ...

Ants farm aphids. They care for them, offer protection, and literally “farm” them – much like humans farm their livestock. Picture ants wearing the frayed straw hat, dirty blue dungarees or coveralls, ...

The “gnats” that appear about this time of year are actually an aphid that goes by several names: conifer root aphid, blue ash aphid, Oregon ash aphid or smoky-winged ash aphid. What you see in the ...

The runner beans that I started in pots became sickly and, when I dug them up, I found that every root was covered in masses of little beetles. Beans planted directly in the ground did not suffer in ...