Not Aphids. While Aphids may cause some plant problems, if there is a large enough population, the blossom drop is not caused by the insect you have. Blossom drop is most often caused by a lack of pollination, Since tomatoes are self pollinators what affects that is temperature, plant movement, water variables, disease, even too much sun.

kimmq is kimmsr

and lack of pollination might be due to all that swearing and goos you are dumping all over the plants ....

do Ts really produce all WINTER long in CA??? .... even with declining hours of sun??? .. this MI boy needs to know ...

also.. you say its a huge massive plant... one side effect of too much fert ... is excessive vegetative green growth.. and potentially a sacrifice of fruit .... if way out of balance...

as to your first question ... i have no opinion ... its not really a garden question ... lol ...

ken

Not aphids, but am not sure what they are. By the way, aphids do come in many colors (including green) and do develop wings at certain times.

But yours still isn't an aphid. :-(

So I am 100% certain that the bugs are the cause of the flower drop: before they arrived I was getting stupid amounts of tomatoes every week. Since their arrival, hardly anything.

And at the end of the day, I don't care if they're aphids or not. What I need to know is how to get rid of these vile little creatures (preferably using organic methods and products). Any help?

I'll go on record saying that those insects and your blossom drop have nothing to do with each other. It is more likely to be day length related than the insects.

But, I hear your concern. What have you observed these critters doing? By any remote chance are your plants grown in containers?

I'm afraid that you've done anything that I would do....Neem oil or insecticidal soap. If these little insects aren't feeding on the plant, the Neem oil won't work. It requires ingestion. And the insecticidal soap must come into physical contact with the culprits in order to work.

You really can't use a systemic on your tomatoes, but even if they weren't edible, such a pesticide won't work unless a pest is actually sucking volumes of sap.

The blossom drop started about 6-8 weeks ago, when the days were quite long. Prior to their arrival, I had very bountiful plants. Since their arrival: just about nothing. This includes both the plants I planted at the beginning of the season and plants that were planted about 2 months ago.

Further damning evidence: I have a tomato plant in the front that barely has any of them on it, and it's pumping out a ton of tomatoes.

The plants are both in beds and containers. Automated drip line in the beds. I stopped fertilizing when I believed they were aphids. The flowers don't drop, they appear dried out. And these bugs are always on the stem immediately below where the flowers are. They tend to just roam around, always below where the flowers are. They're never on sucker branches.

I have sprayed both neem oil and insecticidal soap directly on them and watched them walk around for minutes afterwards.

Basically, tomato production just abruptly stopped right around the same time the population of these bugs jumped up. The plants have been growing in size and are thriving. I had one that had a 33' diameter (my wife ended up pulling it since it wasn't producing but was getting so big).

Here's what it looked like before their overrunning the plants:

I was getting this weekly:

And this was a week or two ago, before my wife pulled up the two biggest ones (there are only 4 tomato plants in the beds in this photo, three in the middle bed and one in a back bed you can't really see):

The plants seem healthy in every single way, except that most of the flowers shrivel up before fruiting. Most drop before they even blossom. But some make it through and flower and I'm getting 1-6 tomatoes a week.