Like most people I first encountered ladybugs as a youth, allowing them to crawl around on my hands and watching with admiration as their hard orange-red shell split down the middle and spread wide like an airplane’s wings, while their lacy underwing whirled and lifted them into the sky and off into the adventure of life. Every year these little friends visited our yard and gardens and I knew they were friends who feasted on the little crawly things that made the leaves sticky and that my dad called aphids. Ladybugs were the good guys, or should I say girls, they may be either, and to this day I don’t now how to tell which is which, and it doesn’t really matter to anyone other than another lady beetle, or some nerdy entomologist, of which I am a bit.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I stumbled upon an overwintering site, on a hike along a river in the Sierra Nevada mountains, set within steep canyon walls with but an hour or so of direct sunlight ever touching the river or trail. Now imagine if you will this fleeting light brightening mosses on leafless limbs and ferns and grasses and shrubs along the trail, and to your delight, just ahead, a shimmering moving mass, almost aglow in orangish-red, like stained-glass on a holy cathedral, but shining up from the ground instead of down, and for a swath twenty to thirty feet wide and at least a hundred feet long. I knew what they were before stooping for a closer look, they were, of course, the decedents of those friends who had flown from my fingers so long ago, North America’s most common ladybug (not really a bug but a beetle), the Convergent Ladybug.
It was cold in the shadows of the canyon and I doubt an aphid was to be found within miles. So, why the throng, what was going on? Well, its kind of like a merging of ways, like of bears and of migratory birds. Hmmm? You see, the ladybugs migrated here on the trigger of a changing circadian rhythm and cooler temperatures and here they were playing bear by hibernating, slowing down their metabolism to survive until spring, when with the warming weather they’re programmed to fly. Even now, I envision them flying from this finger along the river to countless gardens, fields and farms, giving life to other generations, and perpetuating their species, just as their ancestors have done for millennium after millennium.
Now imagine this. In this sacred place (and it is sacred, anyone with a soul could see that) humans come, vacuums roar like predators, and ladybugs, in their slumber, in their sacred grounds, are sucked through tubes, banged by impellor blades, and stuffed into bags and boxes and whisked away from the holy land to be placed in a walk-in box in cold storage. There they rest until the humans deem it’s time to make some money off of what the ladybugs would have happily done for us all for free.
You may see these ladybug prisoners for sale in stores in bags fluffed up with excelsior (wood shavings). What really irks me is that the companies selling them go by names that make them sound as though they are all about being in harmony with nature, which is such a joke it makes me sick to my stomach. The practice should be outlawed!!!
Now I am all for encouraging biological control of pests, but not by perverting a precious cycle of life, and besides, if you buy these you’re mostly wasting your money. Keep in mind, they would have found your garden on their own, especially if you already have aphids (and there are ways to encourage them to settle on your farm well before aphid populations explode). When you release ladybug prisoners on your farm and garden, they are experiencing what feels to them as the warmth of spring and their instinct to fly sets in. They largely just fly away and at best a few feed on but a few aphids before setting off for distant pastures. To release them inside greenhouses or indoor grow facilities is but a death sentence, and their bodies littering the floor has the opposite feel of the holy cathedral from which they were stolen.
If you are set on purchasing ladybugs, please purchase those raised at an insectary. Sorry, you won’t find insectary reared convergent ladybugs as they are so exploited from their natural habitat, but there are other species of insectary reared ladybugs along with multiple species of predatory lacewings and mites, and flies and other beetles and even an array of parasitic wasps that won’t sting you. Go for those if you will, but please, leave the convergent ladybugs alone, leave them be, let them come to you on their own free will, and they will.
Please share if you care.
