Ladybugs and Praying Mantis

Ladybugs and  Praying Mantis—Garden Visitors You Won’t Mind Overstaying

Insects in the garden?! Bring out the pesticides!

Chill— not all insects will chomp away at your plants and ruin your beautifully maintained turf. There are a few creepers and fliers that actually will be helpful in ensuring the healthy growth of your garden.

Some of them are those are cute spotted ladybugs, which are not only charming little creatures to find on the leaves of plants but are also actually fierce predators to aphids and other soft-bodied pests. The young ladybugs take on the aphids which love to suck the sap out of roses (which, by the way, can be a challenge to grow at times) and other plants. If aphids are stunting the growth of your roses, find those cute ladybugs to control the situation.  

Another insect that’s worth keeping in your garden (despite its rather freaky appearance) is the praying mantis. While the female praying mantis has a crazy reputation in the insect kingdom, it can also keep your garden pest situation under control because it feeds literally on all weaker insects and even some arachnids. Of course, the good insects are under threat too with the praying mantis around, so just hope that it finds all the pesky ones first and that the beneficial insects are able to hide from this instinctively merciless predator.

Now, for a completely nice garden visitor, there’s the lovely lacewing, which is quite dependable when it comes to ridding roses and other beautiful blooms of perpetual pests. The lacewing eats these pests but leaves your roses and other plants alone.

If you have aromatic herbs growing in your garden, you can expect frequent visits from mini-wasps as well. These flyers are so small that it’s usually hard to see them. What’s even nicer about them is they leave humans alone, unlike those regular wasps that dive-bomb and sting unsuspecting folks at times. What these little insects do is they lay their eggs on top of or inside grass and leaves-loving caterpillars, parasitizing and killing them as more of their kind are born; all of them will do the same thing to other caterpillars in your garden.

There are so many other teeny-tiny visitors that can yield benefits to your garden such as assassin bugs (that eliminate Japanese beetles), spined soldier bugs, tachinid flies, and more. They are great to have over to make your property’s small ecosystem healthy. If you cannot find any of these welcome visitors in your garden, consult with your local pest control company on alternative methods to detracting those garden destroying pests through eco-friendly pest control methods.