Will this work on box caterpillars ?

[anewername]

I only have this pesticide and my box hedge is crawling in the green caterpillars 🐛 and showing brown patches already . It doesn't list caterpillars on the bottle just various flies and scale insects. Will it work ?

You could try. I am not sure. I had to remove in 2020 100 box plants - 4 areas of low hedging and replace them with 120 yew. It was dreadful. Every single box in the whole garden was killed off by the box caterpillars

@Xenia that must of been horrible to loose all those. I normally garden naturally but I love our box. I'll whack this spray on and hope as we are away for the weekend. But worried I'll return to no hedge. They do munch fast. I picked a few off with gloves, but can see loads of webs and eggs.

I haven't had your issue but I use lots of the Green Gardener products (ladybird larvae, nemotodes etc) and they work.

Maybe this will help www.greengardener.co.uk/shop/pest-control-outdoors/box-tree-caterpillars-and-blight/

That label is for standard Smart bug killer, what you need to be using is Ultimate Bug killer that includes "deltamethrin" as an added active ingredient for caterpillar's.

@leadmeaway ahhh so caterpillars are smart ? Right annoying will it not touch them then?

Seen this recommended elsewhere

@SushiShopSearch I've ordered one. The caterpillars are going crazy, so hopefully I can stop more eggs being laid by preventing the months and just deal with theses one 😬 off to get more sprays ⚠️

I got rid of they last year by using a combination of the moth trap for the male moths as well as the Xentari pesticide spray, mixing the sachets and spraying. The only problem is that this is expensive for us to do every year for ever more. Now we are really considering replacing our box. This will make me really fed up 😰

I must have left it too late. Our 4 areas of low hedging around the borders at front and back of house were put in by us in the late 1990. My son said the new yew looked scraggly in 2020 when first put in, but last year and this it is doing very well so that's something but it was a lot of work to remove them, book and drive to the tip (they thought I was a commercial gardener that summer 2020 as I went so much - in the top 3 in the borough and they sent the boss down twice to tackle me - yet that and the huge area of trees I cleared in the garden for the first time in 20 years was the reason)

I joke at home in 2020 that there were 2 viruses in 2020 causing problems from China and the box caterpillars were another along with covid 19- I think they came over from there.

I use xen tari. It's on Amazon. Have been fighting these things for about five years but the xen tari works and my box is lovely. I spray about every five weeks from April to October.

I've ordered this as my last spray from the garden Centre has been useless even when I bought the caterpillar killing version. I have also not caught a single month yet in my month trap, so who knows.

The caterpillars are certainly still alive and eaten about 10% of my hedges in the past few weeks. I've sprayed multiple times but I'll reattack with this new stuff.

Very annoying that the app cuts off the end of your sentences.

Very annoying that the app cuts off the end of your sentences.