Scale Insects

[rana]

A friend has asked me to revive her ailing potted olive tree and having had a closer look it appears the plant is blighted by scale insects. Do I need to worry about them at all and if so how do I treat for it.

The young tree is about 2.5 feet tall and has suffered considerable leaf drop. The compost in the pot is soil-less so I'm thinking of re-potting in a more earthy gritty mix. Any suggestions..................

[FB.]

Scale are especially common on sickly plants. Their feeding inevitably sucks some of the life out of the plant, so they won't be helping.
I don't generally need to deal with scale problems as the problem is not usually severe (although I can always find a few scale on my plants).
I reckon that you could probably get rid of them easily enough with insecticides (although the dead scale may remain stuck to branches for some time after being killed).

[ohbeary]

seem to recall, that you dab them with a meth's dipped cotton bud.....

[starloc]

Meths , isopropyl alcohol or Limonene ( citrus oil ) , kills scale instantly, just dab it on each insect dont pour it over the tree though, spraying with neem oil solution works as well, the most widly used method in commercial growing these days is spraying with horticultural oil mixed with water, i use neem but real horticultural oil is more like babyoil, use 1 teaspoon in a litre of water

Theres always far more than you can see, theres tiny ones that crawl befoe growing the shells, i always remove as many as i can find with alcohol and then spray with an oil ( or

if its very bad i have sometimes just zaped the tree with systemic pesticide `ultimate bug killer` by bayer
or if im in a nasty mood and an expensive tree is looking realy bad , and its close to winter ( not many bees round ) i have used malathion oil ( but its possibly/probably not allowed in uk? )