When you go to the store to buy shampoo there are myriad choices, but basically the offerings are all the same, at least as it comes to application: Wet your hair, deposit a small amount of shampoo in the palm of your hand, a puddle of ‘poo equivalent to the diameter of a dime or quarter, depending on how much hair you have. Then you lather the shampoo into your hair. Oh, and we can’t forget: “Rinse and repeat.” There is a lot of product consistency. The shopper knows this and either has a brand preference or chooses on price, comparing the per-ounce-price. Simple, right?
So, what, you may ask, does this have to do with buying parasitic nematodes? Nothing. Nothing at all and that is the point. Nematodes, unlike shampoo, have little market consistency. Nematodes come in many forms, active ingredient counts, carriers, shelf-lives, coverages, and prices. It’s really quite confusing. What really brings this fact home is a recent conversation we had with one of our distributors. They were confused, and if they’re confused… Well, it must be wicked confusing for the uninitiated.
So what you do when you shop for nematodes? We have no hard-and-fast rules, per se — though we will tell you to avoid buying non-refrigerated product. We will suggest, as we have literally hundreds of times, is to throw all that confuses you out the window. Forget nematode-counts, packaging, and any of the minute details that annoy. Aside from choosing the appropriate species for the task at hand and making sure you put them out at the right time (when the target pest is present in a susceptible form), focus instead on only three things: Price, coverage, and repeat-application recommendations. That’s it.
Some assumptions are going to be made. First we’re going to assume that if you follow the instructions on any package made by any nematode producer, that the product will work as it says. We’re not saying there isn’t some real crap out there, there is, but we aren’t in the position to grade products. Thus we’re going to think positive thoughts. If you want, we can add the word respectable to the “nematode producer” part of that above. Once this assumption is made, buying nematodes suddenly gets a lot easier.
Now we are left to really comparing the product. Forget that one package containing ten billion nematodes sells for $9.99 while another package containing one million nematodes costs $19.99. Don’t look at that. Look instead at the coverage. Now we learn that the ten billion-count pack only treats 500 square feet and needs to be repeated once. So, barring freight, a treatment of 2,000 square feet will cost almost eighty bucks (($9.99 x 4 = $39.96) x2 times = $79.92). Now we turn to the one million-count package. It says it treats 2,000 square feet (perfect), ah, but you have to treat three times (repeat twice). The cost for this product totals at only sixty bucks, though (($19.99 x 1 = $19.99) x3 times = $59.97).
The latter product, because it needs to be applied three times will require more time and labor. Perhaps the $20 difference in price will be awash if your time is especially limited or valuable. But then again, it is a well known fact in biocontrol circles that smaller releases made more often tend to be much better than single inundative releases. In other words it might be worth the extra time using what turns out is a less expensive product.
Does this all make sense? Stop thinking that you’re paying for individual nematodes, but rather concentrate on the control you’re buying. There are huge differences in the way nematodes are reared, host-extracted, handled, packaged, stored, and sold that all add up to whole mess of confusion, until you cut to the chase and determine what they’re going to do and for how much.
Anyway, and hear this well, when you buy ten billion nematodes and if they can only treat 500 square feet they aren’t very good nematodes. First it is suspected not all ten billion are even alive. You really have to wonder why the disparity is so great. Only 500 square feet? Yep, they’ll probably work as expected, but the performance on a whole — compared to what they can do — is going to be very poor. So, when shopping for nematodes, if you’re going to compare apples, compare them to other apples, not oranges.
