5. Good Organic Gardening - September-October 2016 AvxHome.in

Beneficial insects | PEST PATROL
spots and patterns on their wing casings.
Both the larvae and the adult ladybirds
love to feast on pests such as scale, aphids,
mealybugs, mites and thrips. Some species
even feed on unwanted fungus and mildews.
There are two naughty ladybird varieties
you need to know about, however: the 26-
and 28-spotted leaf-eating species. They
devour your plants rather than your pests.
Some ladybird larvae even look like their
prey, such as the Cryptolaemus that loves to
eat mealybugs. To the untrained eye, their
larvae look so similar they could easily be
mistaken for mealybugs themselves.
Mantids, praying mantis; order:
Mantodea; family: Mantidae
Mantids are the big guys in the world of
insects. They eat many of the larger insect
pests that may be in your garden, including
grasshoppers, crickets and large sapsuckers.
The praying mantis is probably the bestknown
of the mantis species.
The swaying action, amazing eyesight,
180-degree head rotation, speed and stealthlike
movements of the praying mantis make
it a successful predatory insect. As with the
lacewing, you have probably seen many egg
sacs of a mantid species in your garden.
Antlion, lacewing; order: Neuroptera;
family: Chrysopidae
The lacewing is a delicate, pale-green, winged
creature that’s at its peak of pest removal in
larval form. It eats aphids, mealybugs, scale,
thrips, mites, whitefly and even insect eggs.
One particular species is called the
antlion in its larval stage. The antlion has an
ingenious way of capturing its prey: it creates
a slippery pit-like trap and sits at the bottom,
hidden, waiting for its prey to fall in.
You have probably seen many of their eggs in
and around your garden and not even realised
it. The eggs are carefully laid and attached to a
long strand that holds them above the surface
on which they have been laid. This is to keep
them up and out of harm’s way as other insects
may have a taste for them, such as ants.
Adult lacewings love nectar as their main
food source, one of the reasons it’s important to
have flowering plants throughout the seasons.
Quite often, killing the
bad bugs means killing
the good bugs, too,
especially if you are
using an array of nonselective
insecticides.
Hoverflies; order: Diptera;
family: Syrphidae
In Australia alone there are nearly 200
species of these beneficial insects. Hoverflies
pack a punch as a double act in the garden
and in agriculture in general.
Some species’ larvae feast on destructive
sap-sucking insects such as aphids, thrips
and others; then the adults become high-class
pollinators as they feed on pollen and nectar.
Hoverflies can be easily recognised in the
garden by their hovering flying habit. They look
a lot like wasps, which keeps them safe from
predators such as birds and other bug eaters.
James Douch CC, Kerry Boyne
Good ladybird: Harmonia conformis
Did you know?
Some ladybird species can live for up
to two years.
Bad ladybird: Epilachna
vigintioctopunctata,
28 spotted ladybird Praying mantis
Predatory mites; order: Acari;
family : Phytoseiidae
These microscopic bugs are closely related to
ticks and spiders, so are in the class Arachnida.
Many pest species of mites are microscopic,
which means they are often virtually unnoticed
until the damage to plants can be seen and
populations are well out of control.
There are some larger species but even then
they are also very successful in their attacks on
plants, insects and even animals.
This is where the insect world gets
interesting: enter the predatory mites, which eat
the pest species. You could say they beat them
at their own game — war in the micro world.
The species Phytoseiulus persimilis is one
the main consumers of pest mites, such as twospotted
mites.
Predatory mites are regularly used as a
biological control in large-scale agriculture in
place of nasty miticide sprays, against which
many mites build resistance because of their
fast breeding cycles.
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