One of the interesting things about practicing integrated pest management (IPM) is that you get to learn about the relationships between the insects that you consider pests and the insects that eat them.  The lady beetle, or ladybug, is one of the good bugs that eat the bad bugs.  Specifically, lady beetles eat aphids.

Aphid Problems

Aphids are little white bugs that do not move around much during their adolescence, but suck the juice out of plants while secreting “honeydew”.  This thick, sweet substance attracts ants, which protect the aphids so they can eat the honeydew.  It also slimes the plant and allows sooty mold to grow on it.  This mold covers the leaves and prevents photosynthesis from occurring.  If enough of the plant is covered, it starves to death.

Enter the lady beetle.  She, and her immature children, love aphids.  In fact, that is their favorite thing to eat.

Pesticide Paradox

There are two problems that people run into when using biological controls such as the lady beetle.  The first is that if you have been using a lot of pesticides, you may not have any beneficial insects left to eat the bad bugs.  For some reason, no matter how much you spray, the bad bugs always pop back up in a relatively short time.  The predators take longer to rebound.

Manage Pests

The second problem is that you have to tolerate some of the bad bugs in order to feed enough of the good bugs to keep things balanced.  So using IPM will not yield zero aphids.  It will keep them at a very low level where they do not cause economic damage.

Ladybug Lifecycle

If you are prepared to tolerate a low level of aphids so the lady beetle can keep herself and her kids fed, you need to know a little about the bug you just hired. Lady beetles lay eggs on plants. These eggs hatch into larvae that are soft-bodied and covered with spines. After eating on aphids, scales, and mites for a while, they become pupae. From the pupae emerges a lady beetle. This whole cycle takes from 3-6 weeks. There are over 500 naturally occurring species of lady beetles in North America.

Buying Ladybugs

Now, if you have been spraying pesticides, you may not have any lady beetles in your yard. If you want to try IPM, you can purchase them from some of the gardening supply houses. Often, however, you purchase them, release them, and watch them fly away. Expensive mistake! I only did that once.

Attracting Ladybugs

To attract ladybugs, plant some flowers that aphids love in a band near the plants you want to save.  Ladybug larvae only eat insects and spiders.  Ladybug adults also eat pollen and nectar.  Planting some nectar plants near your important plants will help the ladybugs stick around.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.