FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

Hi all,

I'm new to pitcher plants (and to this forum).

In the last week I noticed these small pests appear on the outside of the pitchers: Here is a photo: Does anyone know what they are, and the best way to treat the plant? For context, it is mainly an indoor plant on a sunny windowsill, but I put it outside for a few hours each morning.

Thanks in advance!
~Daniel

First off, welcome to the forum.

Secondly, it looks like that is a North American pitcher plant. If it is, a sunny window will not be enough light for it. It will need at least 4 hours of unfiltered, direct light. A window filters some of the light. If you have to grow it indoors, it will need good artificial light for at least 12 hours a day. Moving the plant from one location to another actually stresses the plant and is counter productive.

Finally, those bugs are aphids. You can control them with Bioadvanced 3-in-1 mite and disease control.


You can also try washing them off with a good stream of water, but it looks like you may have too big of an infestation to do that.

If you don’t want to use chemicals or insecticides in general you can kill them by hand if the plant isn’t very big. Then you can can dislodge some of them with a water jet and finally you can submerge the whole plant in a bucket with distilled water for 2 days and shake it from time to dislodge more aphids. When I bought my S. purpurea it also had aphids. Most of them were on the new developing pitcher so I cut it off. By this way I got rid of most of the aphids. For the rest I just killed them by hand and I managed to completely get rid of them in 3 days. Now my plant is way bigger with a ton of compacted leaves so it would be very hard to kill aphids by hand. The good thing about aphids is that they are kinda stupid and bigger in comparison to other pests ( spider mites, thrips, mealy bugs ). The bad thing is that they mostly reproduce by cloning. Female adult aphids give birth to live baby clones ( they are pregnant too! ). The colony is mostly from females, so if it takes at least one female aphid to survive for the whole colony to revive. You have to get rid off them all. If you want to use insecticides use what Panman suggested.