What, May, you always thought that white stuff was a plant growth, like mould?
We can easily find out. Get out some of the little things inside if you can, John. It is not easy to separate them from their cottony covering without crushing them, but now we can see quite well with the magnifying glass—and yes—you see they are little insects.
We call them the woolly aphids.
You say the ground below the alder bush was all sticky and black, John?
That was the honey dew, blackened by a little plant something like mould, that grows on it.
We often see woolly plant lice in the summer-time on different plants, and one species injures apple trees. It gets on the roots as well as on the tender bark of young trees and kills them.
Yes, indeed, Mollie, the aphids are bugs. They belong to the bug order, which is a very large and important insect family, and contains some members that are exceedingly troublesome to us.