Its been a really long time since I wrote a new post, mainly because we have a 5 month old daughter now and taking care of her is more than a full-time job. Our orchids are getting less attention and unfortunately we’ve lost many.
Back in the springtime, I started finding pests on some of our orchids. In particular, I found scale and mealy bugs. I could take photos to show you, but that’s time consuming and kind of depressing. I physically removed them when I spotted them during watering and/or wiped the affected areas with hydrogen peroxide. These methods ended up being totally insufficient. In the proceeding months, I kept finding pests on more and more of our orchids and continued removing them, but I didn’t use an insecticide. As a result, we lost many orchids, who were weakened by the pest invasion. Maybe three months ago I finally tried using insecticides to get rid of the pests. I guess it was too late for some of our orchids, because the pests continue to spread from plant to plant and more plants have died.
If I could do things over and time wasn’t an issue, I would immediately isolate the pest-ridden plants from the others and spray them with insecticide every few days or perhaps once a week until I could find no further sign of infestation. I think the main lesson is to be vigilant about eliminating pests as soon as they appear. I’m sharing my experience here because its both sad and expensive to lose your orchids. 
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