I spent about 10 minutes looking for anything moving from my plant scrapings. I found lots of crawlers, but none of them were crawling. With the same sample size in previous examinations, I was always able to find a couple moving about after a while.
Paraffin wax melts at 125, but hybrid waxes seem to melt at higher temperatures. If that was what worked, then we've got a terrific solution for future infestations.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
3 comments:
Won't that kill the plant?
Momma Daisy came out looking like she'd been to a health spa. She was green, perky and blooming.
What kind of wax were those candles? The color is a close match for beeswax, which gets kind of squishy at about 100 F (a nice fever temperature). They obviously didn't melt, or else you'd have had puddles, like what I get out of my solar beeswax melter.
At any rate, I do believe you may be on to something here! As long as the daisy is well watered and the chamber is not too humid, she can cool herself off for a while by evaporative transpiration (call it plant sweat, if you like), but I don't think the scale are so lucky (they are built to conserve moisture, not evaporate it).
And a big advantage of heating over suffocating, is that reasonably accurate thermometers are *way* cheaper than oxygen sensors.
That's what I love in experiments: when the original theory doesn't pan out, but the observations made lead to a new, much more productive approach!
(It happens to me all the time in the lab.)
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