Ladybugs!
Yesterday afternoon in an attempt to ward off my sadness over the death of my grape plants, I went wandering through the yard looking at my trees. This makes me feel better because the trees are all getting big and I’m able to enjoy the fruits of my labor instead of looking at seedlings and knowing I’ll have to tend them for months before they bear fruit. All the trees were beautiful, except one. It is a varigated maple tree and it was obviously suffering. It’s neighbor had big shiny leaves, but this tree’s leaves were all small, limp, and curled. A closer inspection revealed aphids. Lots of aphids. I would never have guessed that something so small as an aphid could have the potential to kill a tree, but when each leaf has a crowd of 30-50 aphids and the trunk has turned into an aphid highway I’m guessing the aphids are going to win.
One solution to this kind of infestation is to spray the tree with insecitcide. Only the tree is 25 feet tall. I’m not at all confident in my capability to adequately coat the entire tree. Also the weather is rainy, so the spray would wash off leaving aphid eggs to hatch into a new infestation. In addition I’d get spray all over myself. Insecticide is death to bugs, but it isn’t good for people either. Insecticide is also expensive. Add all of that up and I knew I needed another solution.
The good news is that nature has provided the perfect one. Ladybugs. Ladybugs love to eat aphids. In fact I was able to spot multiple ladybugs which had found the aphid bonanza on my tree. I was also able to spot no fewer than 6 clutches of ladybug eggs on the low branches of the tree. Nature is pushing to get the system back in balance. Unfortunately I looked at the tree and was not sure that the ladybugs would destroy aphids fast enough to save the tree.
Did you know you can buy ladybugs? I learned this several years back when Link’s preschool teacher brought a box of them to school so that the kids could hold ladybugs and release them. Since then I’ve frequently purchased ladybugs to control aphids on my roses. The kids always love the chance to have ladybugs crawl all over them. Except Patches who is terrified by anything insectoid. So I sent Howard to the garden center to buy two bags of ladybugs. They come 1500 to a bag and you keep them in the fridge so that they stay dormant. In the evening after the sun goes down you take them out and empty the bag over your plants. The ladybugs respond to the dark by hunkering down for the night, then in the morning they eat aphids, mate, lay eggs, and generally make the yard a nicer place to be.
Last night was windy and I was worried that most of the ladybugs would blow away, but I was also worried that if I didn’t attack the aphid surplus soon the tree would not be able to recover. So I compromised and released only one of the bags of ladybugs. The other bag is in my fridge awaiting the first calm dry evening so that they can join their friends in my yard. The kids all think keeping bugs in the fridge is kind of cool. Patches in particular keeps asking for me to open the fridge so he can look at the bugs. This amuses me greatly. One bug on the floor is cause for terrified screaming. 1500 bugs in a bag are for saying hello to.
This morning I wandered out to see if the ladybugs had all disappeared. They hadn’t. Contrary to my expectation the cool wind followed by rain actually caused the ladybugs to hunker down in hibernate mode. I now have ladybugs all over the tree and they’ll probably all stay there snacking on aphids until the sun comes out. This is good news for me and for the tree. Bad for the aphids I guess, but I didn’t ask their opinions.