Tobacco smoke & mealy bugs etc.

[BigGym]

Has anyone heard of a 5 minute smudging with tobacco smoke being effective in running off mealy bugs etc? I assume you would use pure raw tobacco and not what phillip morris passes off as tobacco. Take a vote, heresay or valid oldtimer trick? Id never heard of this but I guess the theory is its a dry treatment for certain cacti that have skin damaged by more traditional liquid chems.

[adetheproducer]

You can get nicotine vapourizes for pest control in green houses, my grandad and dad both had these for killing aphids and other small nasties so I can see where the idea may come from. I would asume the smoke would be the effective part.

[DaveW]

An old chap I knew many years ago used to boil all his old cigarette nub ends up in an old tin and make his own nicotine insecticide by adding some soft soap. Not to be recommended since apart from highly concentrating the mixture and the other dangers of smoking (including passive smoking from smoke in the air like your smudging experiment) nicotine can be absorbed through the skin.

http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipe ... Regulation" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In the EU it is technically illegal to use anything not on the approved list as an insecticide for plants, so therefore it is even theoretically illegal to spray your plants with soap suds to kill white and blackfly since soap in not on the list, but nobody will ever prosecute you for doing so. However the EU is considering banning pesticides derived from nicotine as responsible for bee deaths since bees are an essential pollinator of food crops:-

http://www.livinghealthy360.com/index.p ... o-bees-35/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Note in the above link the EU, a largely non tobacco producing area is banning nicotine derived insecticides whilst the US, a tobacco producing country is not. I wonder which politicians are bowing to their influential lobbies or paymasters, since if nicotine is so good at killing insects it can't be doing smokers any good?

In the UK smoking is gradually dying out anyway and the last cigarette making factory in the UK (Players Horizon factory in Nottingham) has just shut, therefore all UK cigarettes will now have to be imported in future.

[Carl_B]

A tip I recently came across in the Epiphyllum Society of America's bulletins was to use 100% cold pressed orange oil works a treat 4 tablespoons to roughly 5 litres of water sprayed on the foliage smells lovely and kills scale and mealies

[A. Dean Stock]

I think that if you smoke the right thing you may not care much about the mealy bug attacks but burning cigars, cigarettes, etc., to get nicotine smoke for killing mealies is approaching insanity. Just get some Bayer's insecticide containing imidadocloprid and be done with it. It is a lot less dangerous than nicotine smoke for humans and pets (but can be disastrous for bees so be careful). I found years ago that all the "home remedies" for curing mealies turned one into a "mealy bug rancher".
Dean

[Saxicola]

Nicotine is one of the most toxic insecticides, but doing what you want to do probably won't be effective. Just buy a good insecticide like Bayer or anything with imidacloprid.

[BigGym]

@ dave, thats pretty deep man.

Its funny...life's a trip. You would think "dose'm once" they would puke, dose'm again and they'll come back for more.. tobacco man.

[DaveW]

If tobacco and alcohol were just introduced the politicians would ban them as addictive drugs. It's only because of their traditional usage, just as Coca chewing is in S. America, they have not.

Don't worry BigGym they will never ban tobacco in our time, though they are trying to phase it out by stopping youngsters starting. In the UK now cigarettes cannot be on display but must be kept hidden in shops and have to be actually asked for. Also they are stopping manufacturers using brand advertising by largely removing it from packets:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26865693" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

But we are only following Australia, so the restriction is spreading in developed countries, just like stopping people smoking in the work place, shops or public buildings and forcing smokers to go and stand outside, often in the rain, if they wish to smoke:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20559585" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

My dad was a heavy smoker, so really addicted. He tried to give up smoking but only lasted one hour without a cigarette!

[bluetexasbonnie]

My grandmother would sprinkle snuff (finally powdered tobacco for sniffing) on her buggy plants. She was a good gardener, so it must have done some good for some bugs. I tried it for aphids and could not tell that it hurt them a bit.

[DaveW]

Probably they sneeze and loose their hold and fall off?