The beneficial bugs found in our gardens vastly outweigh garden pests, so it pays to adopt a nature-friendly approach to gardening. Scour the bushes, look among the vegetables or dig down into the soil and you’ll discover a myriad of beneficials. My personal favorite? The ladybug, whose jazzy wing markings are always a delight to see.
And ladybugs are one of our biggest allies – as we’re about to find out...
Identifying Ladybugs
There are many different species of ladybugs, often named according to the number of spots on their wing cases. For example, the two-spot ladybug, the seven-spot ladybug, the 14-spot, and the seriously funky-looking 22-spot ladybug!
The harlequin ladybug is invasive in both North America and Europe and will eat the eggs and larvae of other ladybugs when food is scarce. But they’re not all bad –they eat lots of pests too!
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Ladybugs are usually red, orange or yellow, and have varying numbers of spots on their wing cases
Ladybug Lifecycle
The ladybug lifecycle consists of four distinct phases.
Eggs
Below are the tiny eggs, typically laid on the undersides of leaves in batches of anything from five to 40 eggs. Nettles are a firm favorite for egg laying, so it’s worth leaving a few patches of nettles to keep these aphid-munching beetles close by.
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Ladybug eggs are laid safely hidden away on the underside of leaves
Larval Stage
And ladybugs eat lots of aphids. As soon as the eggs hatch, the formidable-looking, spiky larvae begin gorging on any aphids they can find. Their voracious appetites will see them devour up to 50 aphids a day, or 5,000 during their lifetime. They eat other soft-bodied pests too, including whitefly, mites and scale insects, making them one of the long-suffering gardener’s very best friends!
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Ladybug larva look fearsome but are only dangerous to soft-bodied bugs like aphids
Pupal Stage
After a series of molts the larva pupates. Often yellow or orange and with black markings, this pupal stage lasts for around one to two weeks during which time the magical transformation from larva to adult beetle occurs.
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Ladybugs pupate for a week or two before turning into the adult beetles we know and love
Adult Beetles
Then, finally, the adult beetle emerges. The brightly-colored beetles hibernate over winter, usually in groups or aggregations, before mating soon after waking up again in spring, ready to start the lifecycle all over again.
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Ladybugs hard at work on the next generation!
Encourage More Ladybugs Into Your Garden
As well as leaving some nettles be, avoid spraying pesticides, which will have a knock-on effect on predators such as ladybugs. It’s tempting to panic at the first sign of aphids, but a little restraint often pays off with a visit from these hungry bugs.
Ladybugs can also be attracted into your garden with pollen-rich blooms. Flat-topped flowers such as yarrow, angelica, fennel and dill are great, along with common companion plants like calendula, sweet alyssum and marigold.
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Flowers like this dill will entice more ladybugs into your garden
Offer ladybugs somewhere to overwinter too. They usually hibernate in hollow stems and other nooks and crannies, so delay cutting back old stems till spring. Or why not make your own ladybug hotel by stuffing straw and a bundle of wide bamboo sections into an old pot, tied together to keep them all in place. Stuff more straw around the sides for insulation, and position the ladybug house one to three feet above the ground, in a sheltered, sunny spot.
You may or may not be aware that we are running a competition as part of our Big Bug Hunt. You’ve seen our attempts at capturing ladybugs on film in the video above, but now we’re after clips of other bugs too. By entering the Big Bug Hunt Video Clip Competition you can help us fill the gaps – and there are cash rewards for every clip we use. Go shoot some bugs!
