Guest Essay by Kip Hansen – 28 September 2020
[ Just a note about a curious thing to lighten your day. ]
This is the time of year that ladybugs start to look for places to spend the winter. They don’t migrate like songbirds, but hibernate, more like bears or turtles. Many of us find ladybugs inside our homes once the weather starts to get cold, or, even more often, in the spring when the ladybugs that have been sleeping inside our home’s walls all winter come out on the inside of the house instead of the outside!
Ladybugs are Good Bugs!
In your flower or vegetable garden, ladybugs are beneficial – both the adult (ladybug) and the larvae eat aphids, mealybugs and spider mites, all of which cause damage to your plants. Ladybugs are so helpful that they are sold as natural “pesticides”, shipped to your home for release in your garden.
The most commonly commercially sold ladybug is the Asian Ladybug – often with thirteen spots, although there are many forms – which has become the predominate species found in the United States. It seems that Asian ladybug larvae eat not only aphids, mealybugs and spider mites, but the larvae of other ladybug species as well! This has possibly contributed to the decline in populations of other ladybugs in the United States.
The Lost Ladybug
The Official State Insect of New York State is its native Nine-Spotted Ladybug.
Only one small problem, for almost 30 years, the nine-spotted ladybug hadn’t been spotted in New York State. So, in 2000, Cornell University started The Lost Ladybug Project. In 2011, on an organic farm in Amagansett, NY, Peter Priolo, a volunteer the Lost Ladybug Project, found a single nine-spotted ladybug on July 30 in a patch of sunflowers during a group search he had organized.
The NY Times reported:
As of 2006, only five nine-spotted ladybugs had been found in North America in the previous 10 years, none of them in the East. Then one lone ladybug was found in Arlington, Va. None had been found in the East since, and only 90 have been reported in North America.
Researchers from Cornell University subsequently collected enough nine-spotted ladybugs from the new found colony to enable them to start a captive breeding project. Here a video from Cornell about it, just under 5 minutes long.
https://www.cornell.edu/video/lost-ladybug-project
In the video, we hear that it is the seven-spotted ladybug, which came over from Europe, is displacing the nine-spotted ladybug in New York State.
On each wing cover, we see three-and-a-half spots – making seven. Our Lost Ladybug has four-and-a-half spots on each wind cover, making nine. This means, as far as spots go, that the Lost Ladybug Project is about those two missing spots.
Ecologically, of course, it is much more complicated and nuanced. Not all ladybug species behave in exactly the same manner, don’t eat exactly the same prey and may not fill the exact same niches in either their original or current environments.
For better or for worse, The Lost Ladybug Project is breeding and releasing colonies of nine-spotted ladybugs through Cornell County Extension agent offices.
A handy ladybug identification poster is available from the Lost Ladybug Project here [ pdf ].
Those interested, especially those being forced to homeschool kids through the fall and winter, might want to visit The Lost Ladybug Project website. Citizen Scientists of all ages can find, photograph and report sightings on their web site. Any child that can count to ten will be able to participate. Even I can do it.
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Author’s Comment:
All of my children were homeschooled at one time or another, all for varying reasons. We considered this kind of an opportunity a windfall.
Of course, during my “homesteading days” we raised a huge garden, mostly organic from necessity, and my kids were great at finding and identifying the various insects, both good and bad – they also ate most of the vegetables right in the garden. My wife and I had to pick anything we hoped to get into the house.
Glad to hear from you on insects and gardening issues.
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I used to buy a box of ladybugs in the spring every year, when I was in high school. Kept them for about 10 days until the weather warmed up a little, then took them out to the apple trees in the back yard and opened the box after I put it into a spot on the branches that would hold it steady.
Then I opened the lid slowly, let them crawl out, and they’d slowly emerge in small numbers, hop right on the apple tree branches, warm up a bit and start crawling around looking for small bugs to eat. Worked fine, and they’d also turn up in the garden. Never had bad bugs show up, unless you count some black wasps that were interested in getting nectar out of the parsley blossoms.
Sara ==> That sounds like a good method.
I miss that kind of thing, Kip. No place to do it around here, and I doubt that the DNR in my area would approve of it, even though the native plants would benefit from it.
Kip. A bit late to comment so probably you won’t see this. I had a “homesteading” period as well, raising six kids of mine and two of somebody else’s. Sheep, dairy cow, pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, horse, market garden, oats, feed corn, hay …I believe I discovered something new about a similar bug – the harlequin beetle.
Apparently known only as a leaf pest, I found they suck the life out of immature potato beetles. I noted, mysteriously, young potato beetles dead and shriveled up on many potato plants until I came across a harlequin beetle in the act of finishing off one of these young bugs. I actually spread harlequin around my potato crop after that with good results. I had forgotten about this in the ensuing 40 years until I read your article
Gary Pearse ==> I try to keep up with all comments on my essays.
Yes, the Asian ladybugs and their larvae eat not only aphids, mealybugs and such,but the larvae of other ladybugs and other insects as well.
Loved that homesteading period of my life too.