Beech blight aphid boogie

[Tigger]

These showed up in our garden for the first time this year, as far as we know. Apparently they cause little harm to the tree, but are about the freakiest things ever.

At first, it looks like some sort of cottony scale. But when you shake the branch, they all raise their cottony appendages and wave them around. See the video link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HaMqEIb ... r_embedded

Darn hard to get a picture of these, too!

[Chris_W]

I've seen these here on occasion, but never that many! The first one I ever saw was actually floating/flying through the air. At first I thought it was a cottonwood seed, but it seemed to be moving independently. So I followed it and damned if it wasn't one of these aphids! I'm not sure what they might have been on around here, but if I saw them that bad on a plant here I would be killing them so fast I wouldn't have time to get pictures or videos

Too freaky!

[JaneG]

Chris, I saw the little cottony things floating in the air and like you, I realized they weren't exactly floating, but were actually flying. It is some type of aphid in the family of "Wooly Aphids." When you see them in the summer they are moving from their Primary Host to their Secondary Host. They require two types of trees to complete their lifecycle. For instance, the Wooly Alder Aphids starts out on a Maple tree, then in May or June they leave the maple, and must find an Alder tree to complete their lifecycle. Primary host, secondary host, etc. It was very interesting reading about these little fluffs.

The bad news is that a heavy infestation of any kind of aphid can damage a tree by continually, year after year, sucking the sap from it. Also, if there is a heavy infestation aphids can leave "honeydew" or a sticky film on things under the badly infested tree. It can be an icky mess.

Yours are really cool, Tigger!