Systemic spinosad and ladybugs

I’ve noticed a few spider mites in my flower tent. I’ve been doing my best at manually removing infested leaves. I also treated the soil with nematodes and sprayed the tent with spinosad once.

I’ve been keeping them under control, but I haven’t been able to eradicate them so the next thing I’m going to try is ladybugs.

The only thing I’m hung up on is that I just did a systemic spinosad treatment on the plants. I’ve never done that before but I’ve read lots of evidence that spinosad works great as a systemic insecticide. In theory this makes my plants toxic and kills the mites as they feed. I don’t know if this worked yet, because I just did it yesterday. What I don’t want to happen is for a spider mite to feed on the plant and become toxic to the ladybugs.

I just did the spinosad treatment yesterday. Is it okay to go ahead and get some ladybugs and release them today, or should I let the spinosad metabolize longer? I don’t want the ladybugs to get poisoned.

teddy bonkers said:

if you're growing indoors, don't bother with ladybugs unless you want a bunch of dead lady bugs all up in your lights.

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The spider mite problem is indoors. I’m growing with LED strips and boards so there’s no reflector hood for them to get trapped in, if that’s what you’re getting at. I also have prefilters over my exhaust so they can’t get sucked out. I’ll try to get some pics when the lights come on. They’re mostly sticking to the lower leaves and I’ve only ever seen one or two crawling on the undersides.