HOW TO INVITE BENEFICIAL INSECTS

                   INTO YOUR GARDEN
                

How do you keep beneficial insects in your garden and make them stay there after you have bought them from a supplier? Insects bred elsewhere and then released are not adapted to your garden environment.

You can inundate your garden with beneficial insects and hope that that they will attack or eat up all the bad bugs. But soon you will realize that only a few are left. The rest have flown away to neighboring areas.

 

            GIVE THEM FOOD AND SHELTER
                   AND THEY WILL COME

The first and most important step to make then stay is to stop spraying with pesticides (includes organic pesticides) in your garden. Pesticides do not discriminate between good and bad bugs.

To use beneficial insects to your advantage, it is best to
create an environment that they like. When you do that, you are attracting the desirable native or adapted kind of beneficial insects in your area. They will come, multiply and thrive there.

Grow plants for them that provide food and shelter. Since beneficial insects feed not only on bad bugs but also on nectar and pollen at different stages of their life cycle, grow the kind of flowering plants that they like.

Plant hedge rows between your garden plots or at field borders. There should be a mix of small fruit and flowering trees with shrubs, annual weeds, flowering annuals and perennials.

Beneficial insects are also partial to vegetation of different height. These provide shelter and successive blooms supplying nectar and pollen throughout the growing season.

Lacewings like plants that provide shady, protected areas to lay their eggs.

 
                            WHAT TO PLANT?

Plants in the parsley family (Umbellifera) such as dill,
wild carrot, cilantro, fennel, caraway, coriander, yarrow, rue, clover, and Queen Anne's lace are favored by the parasitoid wasps, lacewings, syrphid flies, tachinid flies, and assassin bugs. These insects like masses of small blossoms rather than one large blossom.

Composite flowers such as daisies, zinnias, dahlias, chamomile, and marigolds in the sunflower family attract ladybugs, lacewings, parasitic wasps, hover flies, and robber flies. Ground beetles hide and over winter among low-growing plants such as buckwheat, thyme, rosemary and mint. Wild roses also provide a sanctuary for a variety of other good insects.
 

         LIVING MULCH IN FRUIT ORCHARDS

Orchard fruit growers have maximized the advantage of having a resident population of good bugs protecting their fruit trees all year long. They leave the living mulch alone on the orchard floor rather than clear mowing as they had done in the past. By doing so, they managed to reduce pest population drastically.

This living mulch consisting of orchard grass, yarrow, vetch and clover that serves as bed and breakfast for the good bugs.  A living mulch with legumes like clover and vetch also has other benefits. Their blossoms provide nectar and pollen for honeybees that pollinate their fruit crop.

The legumes also harbor rhizobia bacteria in their roots that fixes nitrogen from air.

        GREENHOUSE WHITEFLY CONTROL


This is a documented case of successfully by using commercially purchased beneficial insects to control pests. This gives almost 100% control and it works only under controlled conditions such as in a greenhouse environment.
It works because both pest and predator are confined in one small space with nowhere to go.

Tomato and poinsettia greenhouse growers are often plagued by heavy whitefly infestations. To target control of the greenhouse whitefly and the sweet potato whitefly, greenhouse growers introduce their natural enemy, the parasitic wasp, Encarsia formosa.

The wasps are released within the confines of the
greenhouse where they cannot escape. This is unlike
the situation in which purchased beneficial insects are released in the garden - where they are free to roam and fly away.

Keeping the parasitic wasps within an enclosed area
greatly enhances the chance of the wasps finding
their enemy. It is like serving up a banquet for the
wasps. Since no pesticides can be used in this greenhouse
situation, growers can now use bumble bees for pollination instead of paying hired labor for hand pollinating each individual blossom. The use of bumble bees is a significant cost savings over paying for purchase of pesticides and manual labor.

This "seek and destroy" method works perfectly within the confined of a greenhouse environment provided that you correctly identify your  pest and purchase the "matching" predator to hunt it down. This is when you want to make your County Extension agent or master gardener your friend.

 

                   Garden Articles Index        HOME