It’s tough when things you count on turn out to be illusions.
Here’s one more: when
summer’s finally over, bugs won’t bother your landscape
anymore.

You think that’s true. But that’s just because you can’t see
the ones chawing down on
some of your favorite plants. Unless you look very closely.

"Southern red mites are cool-season pests," said
Beverly Sparks, an
entomologist with the University of Georgia Extension Service.
"They’re most active
in early spring and fall."

Mites are tiny creatures. They don’t look as sinister as
their spooky cousins, the
spiders and scorpions. In fact, they look mostly like they’re
not even there.

But they are. Southern red mites are a common pest of
azaleas, camellias, rhododendrons
and hollies. They sometimes invade junipers, too. So they’re
found in some pretty
prominent places in many Georgia landscapes.

"You can see them against a white background,"
Sparks said. "If you
shake them off on a piece of paper, for instance, you can see
them. But they’re tiny.
Adults are about the size of a pinhead."

But these tiny bugs can do some big-time damage to plants.
Their feeding shows up on
the upper side of leaves as stippling — tiny white specks — or
as a bronzing of the leaf
surface.

You won’t find the mites themselves up there on top of the
leaf, though. They’re eating
away on the underside.

"They have mouthparts that enable them to suck out the
contents of individual
cells in the leaves," Sparks said. "In high numbers,
they can do some serious
damage. I have seen some dieback in severely infested
plants."

Even when the mites don’t kill branches, the stippling and
bronzing of the foliage can
make the plant pretty ugly. And that’s not what you planted it
there to be.

To get rid of Southern red mites, Sparks said, treat infested
plants with an
insecticidal soap, horticultural oil or a miticide. Sparks
recommends kelthane or
diazinon.

Whatever you use, she said, the key to making it work is
covering the underside of the
leaves.

"That’s not easy to do," Sparks said. "Hollies
and camellias, especially
— with their cupped, waxy leaves — can be hard to cover. But
good coverage is critical
to getting good control."

Any coverage at all, though, is more than Southern red mites
often get. "Most
people," Sparks said, "just aren’t looking for bugs in
the winter."