Garden Maintenance: Beneficial Bugs

Close up of a lady bug on a leaf

Beneficial Bugs

The subject of bugs might not be everybody's favorite, but since they really affect our food supply, I want to tell you about some that are friendly to our survival, so you will be happy to see them in your garden.

Here are 8 of the most common beneficial bugs:

These are bugs that generally help universally, but if you purchase them, make sure you get your local variety. But first try to attract them because then you will have the right environment to sustain the ones you do wind up buying if there weren’t any around to attract.

Lady Bugs are to my knowledge a beneficial insect all over the globe. Their cuteness hasn’t hurt their popularity a bit! I can’t think of any other bug, besides a bee that is depicted in so many items like  coffee mugs, night lights, T-shirts, bibs, kitchen timers, toys, etc, etc, etc. It’s a bug people actually like!

The larvae of the Lady bug are not so cute. It is a furry or bumpy black thing that has a few red or yellow dots on it. The adult winds up with a red domed shell looking surface that has black dots. The look varies around the world sometimes they have an orangy color with not as defined dark brown dots, but they can even be pink, yellow or brown or shiny black. And sometimes they don’t even have dots. The black ones have white dots. If it resembles a ladybug it more than likely is a lady bug.

The larvae might not be very cute, but they make up for it in usefulness. In their lifespan, which varies with the different varieties and the amount of food available, is an average of four weeks. During that time they eat non stop. One larva can eat 100 aphids a day. A ladybug can lay hundreds of eggs at a time. So they do a lot to keep your plants safe.

Then when the larvae go through the pupa stage and become an adult, the adult still eats about 50 aphids a day. 

Aphids are the number one bug that would eat your plants. They are tiny pear shaped soft bugs that pierce the leaves and stems with their mouth parts and suck out the sap. They can be a variety of colors ranging from light yellow green to pink, red, gray or black. some have wings, some don’t.

Lady bugs hardly ever become a nuisance. Even if they eat all the aphids in your garden they also eat mealybugs. mites and scale insects. Also they have wings so they can leave to find food in other tree canopies, but if worst comes to worst, they will reduce their own population by eating each other.

Lady bugs also lay infertile eggs to supplement their larvae with protein.

Guess where the name Lady Bug came from? Well the story is that in Medieval Europe crops were plagued by pests, so they prayed to the Virgin Mary for a solution. Then the Lady Bugs arrived. We call them bugs in the US, but in Europe they call them Lady Birds short for “Our Lady’s Birds” and sometimes “Beetles”. In Germany they are “marienkafer” which means Mary Beetles.

One more thing on Lady Bugs. Are you familiar with the custom of blowing on a Lady Bug to make it fly away after you say: “ Lady Bug Lady bug, Fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children will burn”? I though we were just creating urgency to make them leave. But it actually comes from historic Britain where they burned their hop fields when the season was over. Isn’t it funny how we just pass things down through the centuries like that?

Close up of a praying mantis hanging upside down on a stem of a plant

Praying Mantis- This insect is very unusual. If you don’t know what it is it could scare the bejeezus out of you. It did me! Its two forearms are very strong. I know first hand. When I was 3 or 4, when coming home from somewhere with my mother, I tried to turn the door knob on the front door. I couldn’t see it, but something grabbed my index finger and pushed it to the side. It let go when I pulled my hand away. And then it made itself visible in a fighting stance on top of the doorknob. 

I was in motion to crush it with I don't know what, but my mother held my arm and stopped me. She explained that it is illegal to kill a praying mantis. I objected. That thing grabbed my finger. She calmed me down and we gave the thing some space so it could fly away off our doorknob. She said they were beneficial to farmers so there was a law protecting them. I just did a cursory check on that and it turns out that was a rumor spread in the 50’s when the bug was imported to keep people from killing them. It had something to do with fighting locusts.

Well we call it a praying stance, but it is to me a fighting stance. 

These bugs are straight up hunters. They use brute force to subdue their victims. They eat everything they can overpower, even small birds or frogs, but mostly they hang out in gardens or other highly vegetated places and wait for their prey to stumble onto them, which is usually insects. They are very well camouflaged. Their heads can turn 180 degrees.  No other insect can do that. They can survey the whole area and follow the approach of their prey without moving their bodies which makes them hard to spot. You don’t see them till they pounce. 

Praying mantises are known to eat each other when they meet, but not always. The female praying mantis kills the male after mating, but sometimes she beheads him before hand. But on some instinct the male completes the fertilization even without a head. I knew those things were creepy. So you won’t find a whole lot of praying mantises in one place, but one of them reduces the population of anything it can and if there are a lot of pests it does help. 

The drawback of a praying mantis is that it will eat “good” bugs too.

Some people have praying mantises as pets. Generally they don’t bite humans. When they have it was like a pinch and didn’t break the skin.

Hoverflies resembles a bee in coloring, but is much skinnier. It mimics the bees movement and is a great pollinator, but doesn’t have a stinger, so they are completely harmless to humans. They do a pretty good job on garden pests though. You can attract them with lemon balm, dill and marigolds.

You can also make a “Hoverfly Lake”. It’s a great thing to do with kids. It teaches them about the importance of insects in the garden.

Just put a container of water in a shady spot and add leaves, grass and twigs. They will float to the top and provide a platform for the hoverfly to land on and lay her eggs.

It will take a few weeks, but you will see little rat tailed larvae swimming in the water and you can feel good that you succeeded in attracting a natural predator and also a fantastic pollinator.

Lacewings are one of the more beautiful bugs with a bright green body, metallic eyes and large transparent wings that sweep up from their bodies and extend behind them. Green veins shimmer through the wings which look like lace. 

Lacewings with their larvae rival the ladybug in eating aphids so much that they have been nicknamed the “Aphid Lion”. 

Lacewings are great for small gardens and can even make a home in a hanging basket, but they are also at home in large fields

You can make a lacewing lair to attract them or buy larvae or eggs online or at a garden center.

Lacewings have their ears at the base of their wings so that they can hear a bat coming and can close their wings to hide and avoid becoming dinner

To make a lacewing lair, cut the bottom off of a plastic water bottle and stuff it with some rolled up corrugated cardboard. Make some holes on either side of the bottle toward the bottom and put a stick through it to keep the cardboard from falling out. Then hang it up in a relatively sheltered part of your garden, preferably 6ft off the ground. You can put both ends of a string in the opening of the bottle and then screw the cap back on to make a loop.

Close up of a beetle on soil

Ground Beetles- These come out at night. In the day they hide under rocks, mulch or any garden debris. They can be a variety of very cool colors. The violet beetle is black with violet or blue edges. There are bright green beetles and copper colored ones as well.

Japanese beetles are also copper colored, but they aren’t “ground beetles”. They are out in the daylight eating your plants and then they sleep in the ground. Ground beetles help reduce the Japanese beetle population by eating their larvae.

Ground beetles can eat slugs, grubs and caterpillars. Besides their mouth parts they use digestive enzymes. They spit out the enzymes and let it sit and then eat the partially digested flesh. That’s how they can eat things bigger than they are one bite at a time.

Parasitoid Wasps- Are not themselves parasitic. They are called parasitoids because their larvae are parasitic. Many of these wasps are less than a millimeter long, but some are as big as 4 inches long. 

These poor creatures can be totally misunderstood. They look menacing because it looks like they have long stingers. But they don’t have any stingers and they are solitary, not belonging to any colony or hive and so won’t be defensive. As an aside, did you know that 90% of all bees are solitary. I thought they all lived in hives.

What looks like a stinger is actually what the female uses to lay her eggs. She pokes the host and lays her eggs inside the bodies of garden pests. Then the eggs hatch and feed on the host and cut their way out.

These can really impact a population of pests really fast. They are the number one bug used in commercial fields and greenhouses. It is safer than other methods because you can really pinpoint the species of bug you want to target with these. Each kind of wasp has a particular host it looks for to complete its life cycle.

These wasps can be attracted to your garden with the right plants. They love coriander (cilantro), marigolds and fennel as well as dill flowers and bolting brassicas. Brassica is part of the cabbage family and are informally known as the cruciferous vegetables because of their crosslike flowers.

Spiders- A lot of people might have trouble with this one. Spiders just look menacing to most people. But spiders are an essential companion in the fight against pests in your garden. They are the first to arrive in the growing season because they never left. They spend the off season hiding in gardening debris. 

They make their webs which at times can be real works of art and they get straight to snacking on unwanted garden pests.  Sometimes they do snag a good guy though. They apparently are not aware of our priorities.

To attract spiders to your garden don’t do an overly good job of tidying your garden over the winter.

Bees- And last but not least, Bees. What would we do without bees? Well. If it were not for honey bees and bumble bees and others of the estimated 4,400 species of bees just in North America, farmers would be paying Billions of dollars to pollinate their plants. Without pollination, no crops would grow. So they would have to pay it or everybody would starve.

Bees are attracted to flowers of all kinds, especially bright ones. Lavender in particular attracts the wonderful bee and planting it around your garden can increase your yields, especially in a small space.

So now you are an expert on what bugs would be good to have in your garden. I hope the information helps you to have a healthy high yield garden you can enjoy and share.


*This article is intended for informational purposes. The statements above have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
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