Harvesting? Pests Got You Down? Here’s What You Can Do!

bugs on cannabis harvest

When it comes to harvesting your cannabis plants – there’s a sense of excitement. I am currently days away from harvesting a pine-smelling cannabis plant that seems to be leaning towards the “Indica” side of the spectrum.

I currently have four plants…err…three now, which are at different stages of development. The reason I went from 4 to 3 was because when I inspected the smallest one – the one that never grew beyond the scope of a “bud” [for months] because it was in a small flowering pot – when I noticed a bit of “white” in the buds.

Upon further inspection, and by moving the nugs to the side from the stem I found a nest [if that’s what you call it] of mealybugs. I typically inspect my plants daily, checking under the leaves and getting rid of bug-eggs, spider mites and anything that want to destroy my plants.

This small bud on the other hand, was so small it seemed that nothing would happen to it – but I guess I was wrong and now I had to take emergency action to save the little bud from the mealy bugs.

Fortunately, I have been growing cannabis for a while and converse with growers who are far better at it than me. As I saw all this shitfuckery manifest on my bud – I remembered a trick a more experienced grower told me when you are faced with a pest problem on harvest time – freeze them!

Now I can already hear some of you say, “Freezing cannabis ruins the THC!” of which I am in total agreement, however when it comes to saving your pest-infested bud then you have to engage into a “lesser of two evils” type situation.

On one hand, if you were to simply harvest the bud as is – you’ll have to deal with hundreds if not thousands of little fuckers moving about, making it hard for you to individually pick off the pests – not to mention all the bug shit and piss it leaves behind.

On the other hand, you could wash it with insecticidal soap – of which I wrote about previously – but when it comes to harvest time, you don’t want to be adding soaps onto the buds – especially if you’re not going to have time to rinse it completely.

This leaves you with the “Freeze option”. At first, I was not sure how this would work because I had never done this before. Nonetheless, I had no more options and so I harvested the little “bud-plant” and dropped it into the freezer for about 15-30 minutes.

This worked to immediately kill the entire plague. When I checked about a half an hour later – all of the mealybugs were not moving anymore. This is because these bugs like heat – giving them a cold shock like that, especially dropping it below 0º Celsius – kills them rather quickly.

Once the mass bug genocide was concluded, I had to inspect the bud to see what could be saved and what should be discarded. All of the top bud was too infested and at some parts, I could visually see some rot occur – this was not going to go inside of my body.

As I went down the bud, the population of bugs decreased and so, at some point I decided to begin individually – with tweezers, get rid of the mealybug corpses left on the bud.

The cannabis was also starting to freeze, but I managed to take out the bud before that happened. Nonetheless, when the “thawing process” started, I could see that some of the THC crystals went to hell with the entire process.

I spent the better part of 30-minutes picking out the bug corpses and then started the drying process of the bud. To be honest, I saved far more bud than I had anticipated. When I first saw the mealybug infestation – I didn’t think I was going to be saving anything, but after freezing them for 30-minutes, I saved roughly 60-70% of the infected bud, albeit with a diminished THC profile and probably a loss of terpenoids and flavonoids.

Of course, the bud I harvested weight about 5-grams [wet], so even if I lost it all – it would have been not too big of a loss. However, if it was my other plant – which has about 60-70 grams of wet bud on it, the freezer trick would have allowed me to save a decent amount. In that instance 60-70% of your crop saved is a massive win!

I’m very grateful that the mealybug infestation happened on my dwarf plant – if it had happen to one of my larger plants, I’d be pissed for a week.

But then again, cannabis growing is a lesson in patience, accepting things you cannot change and dealing with problems head-on – finding creative solutions along the way.