Ladybugs!

Or ladybirds… whatever you call them, they are a welcome sight to organic gardeners. They eat aphids (greenfly), and their larvae are even more voracious aphid eaters. The bug in the photo is a larva, and as you can see, it doesn’t look anything like the familiar adult insects with their bright red shells and black spots. Before they’re larvae, they’re yellow eggs
that are laid on the underside of leaves. You may have see these on organic lettuce bought from the farmers’ market, or if you’re lucky, you’ll see them in your garden.

I’m excited about this larva, because I released about 1500 ladybugs into the garden last week in the hope that some of them would create some. They prefer to be released late at night, so I decided to potter around the garden at 11 o’clock last Friday night, setting the scene for my insect friends to have a little romance. Et voila! It seems the plan worked, we have larvae! Which means less aphids for the citrus and apple trees to fight off.

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This was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 9:34 pm by Ysanne Spevack. To link here, use the permalink. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed.