Welcome to You Ask Andy

Richard Gilmer age 13, of Payette, Idaho

What are aphids?

That little green bug on a cucumber leaf is an aphid. Chances are the gall on the apple tree was made by another aphid. Another aphid weakens our corn by sucking the sap from its roots. Most aphids are pretty insects and all of them have a most fascinating family life story. Apart from this Andy has little or no good to say about them. We call them plant lice. They feed on the sap of some of our favorite plants weakening our crops. Some form galls that harm orchard trees. Many carry blights by infecting plants with disease viruses.

The aphids belong to a large branch of the insect family.. The average aphid is a small green bug almost always a female, She often has two pairs of gauzy, lightly veined wings. The back pair is much smaller than the front pair and both pairs are held down her sides when Mrs. Aphid is resting or feeding.

The food is always fresh sap from a living plant, The mouth is a sucking tube which pokes forth from the insect's forehead, Being such a small creature, the beak is not strong enough to pierce bark or strong stems, The aphid feeds on the sap from leaves and tender shoots, . A few live their whole lives underground! feeding from the roots of plants like our precious corn.

The fascinating life story of the aphid is hard to' believe, The winter is spent in the egg stage. Each kind of aphid places its eggs near its own special food supply. The eggs hatch in the spring and, of all things, every single one of them is a female. Each is a nymph, a minute copy of Mama without wings. The little girls eat and eat and grow and grow, Soon they lay eggs of their own and we get a new generation of aphids, This is amazing because there are no Papa aphids around, There may be twelve following generations throughout the summer all of them females and all this without the help of any Papa aphids at all.

One batch of eggs in the fall is more normal, It hatches into males and females, These females lay a batch of properly fertilized eggs and these are the eggs that do not hatch until spring, Then the amazing fatherless family cycle begins all over again:

The farmer fights aphids with special sprays. The winged females can migrate to new food supplies and the pests spread rapidly, The cotton aphids will settle for cucumber or melon sap. The bean aphid also attacks the sugar beet. This fellow winters in a spindle tree waiting for the new crop of beans to sprout,

The corn aphid is dependant upon ants. The ants love the gooey honeydew given off by the aphids and act as nursemaids to the little pests, The aphid eggs are layed in the ant hill, The ants carry them to the roots of the knot grass where they hatch and feed until the new corn is ready, Then the ants carry them to corn roots where they feed all summer, Without the busybody cornfield ants we would have no corn aphids to suck the sap from our corn.

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