Lady Bird Beetles

Pdf version here:  PDF.PDF 

Ladybugs like moisture; they can stay hydrated from the water in the paper towels. Look for aphids in your garden, usually clinging to the underside of rose petals or leaves. Add them to the container. Alternatively, soak raisins in water and provide them to your new pets.

The Ladybug

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.

Your house is on fire,

Your children do roam.

            This jingle was first sung in Ireland when farmers burned the hop vines at the end of the harvest. The vines were usually covered with aphids and ladybugs. Ladybugs were there to eat the aphids, one of their favorite foods along with scale insects, thrips, chinch bugs and alfalfa weevils. Ladybugs eat bugs that eat plants so farmers try to preserve them.

            In the Middle Ages, farmers realized that ladybugs were helpful. They called them the “cows of the Lord” or the “beetles of the Blessed Lady”. From these terms came the many nicknames of this helpful bug: lady beetle, ladycow, ladybird and ladyfly.

            This bug was so beneficial that people of olden times thought it could do other miraculous things. In England, they believed it brought good crops with it. In central Europe, they thought it brought fair weather. In Scandinavia, they believed that a girl would marry within a year after a ladybug landed on her hand. In some countries, it was thought that a crushed ladybug put into a cavity would stop a toothache. Of course, a ladybug can do none of these things.

            Ladybugs, both male and female, devours insect enemies with a huge appetite. Even the baby ladybugs eat the eggs of aphids and other insects.

            The ladybug family deserves a medal for saving one industry—the citrus crop of California. Early in 1900, citrus growers imported a new kind of orange tree from Australia. But along with the trees came a new Australian scale insect that proceeded to eat its way through all the orange groves in California. The United States Department of Agriculture was called in to try to save the trees from dying. Government scientists went to Australia and found a species of ladybugs that ate the scale bugs. A large shipment of these ladybugs was sent to California and within a year, these beetles and their descendants had destroyed the dangerous scale bugs Since then, this species of ladybugs has been sent to Portugal, Syria, Italy, South Africa and Egypt to save the citrus crops of these countries when they were attached by the scale insects.

            Because ladybugs are so valuable, there are people who search for ladybugs to harvest. They often go to high mountains where ladybugs go to hibernate over the winter. Some scientists believe ladybugs travel to high mountain spots so that they will be safe from their natural enemies and can hibernate without fear of being eaten. One lucky hunter found a spot about the size of a city block that contained more than 750 million ladybugs. The beetles must have been spending their winters in that spot for years and years because the ground was covered with old, dead beetle bodies. When a hunter finds ladybugs, they pack the beetles in boxes or sacks and sell them. It takes 1500 ladybugs to weigh an ounce.