Thank you!

Thank you. That is good to know there is no difference.

Ok, this is probably a REALLY stupid question...........but I will ask it anyway. I have 2 or 3 large bottles of baby shampoo that I got for some cockamamie thing I was going to try.............do you think that would work, or does it have to be dish soap?

Hmm, good question. I'm not sure baby shampoo has soap as such in it - otherwise how do they make it "no more tears" because soap sure as heck stings your eyes. But it must dissipate oil off your hair somehow. Ok, got my Burt's Bees Baby shampoo label, but we may need Rick or some other chemist to tell us if these ingredients will kill bugs. Take a look at your label, it may be different than mine. My dish soap label has a few ingredients in common, but not the leading ones.

Maybe mix some up in a little spray bottle and try it? Next time you spot a wasp or something you don't mind murdering? Dish soap works great on wasps, btw.

It is "no more tears" because they put an anesthetic in it to keep it from burning. Otherwise it is the same shampoo. That is what I was told "way back when".

I will look tomorrow.

I know ladybugs are good for eating pests- I just had an issue with spidermites and gnats, I bought 300 ladybugs from Amazon for $4.50. They didn't eat any plants and got rid of my infestation quickly. A few weeks later and I have maybe 20 ladybugs still alive in my plant room. Hopefully it'll help you!!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d...

I'd enjoy trying to make sense of a photo of the "ingredients" fine print. Or I might be able to look up the MSDS from an exact product name.

But I could only figure out if each ingredient is or isn't one of the "natural soap" ingredients. There are likely to be a whole raft of synthesized compounds I won't recognize and might not be able to look up.

But if both soap AND synthetic detergents / surfactants kill bugs equally well, and are similarly low in toxicity to sensitive plants, it would not matter much which you used. Maybe the commercial insecticidal soaps I've seen are all real soaps because people tend to buy traditional products, or natural / organic products, or those that are less phyto-toxic.