Ladybug, Ladybug
by Madeline Bodin
Who loves a ladybug? For centuries, everyone did. These tiny beetles gobble aphids and other soft-bodied insects that plague crops and ornamental plants.
It is said that their name refers to the Virgin Mary, to whom our European ancestors gave thanks for the beetles that saved their crops. In Britain they are called ladybirds or ladybird beetles. They are also called lady beetles. For centuries they were thought of as lucky. (In Iran they are called "Good News.")
So yes, there are gentleman ladybugs. As far as we know, the name has nothing to do with feminine characteristics. Ladybugs share a basic body plan with their fellow beetles, which includes the wings that let them "fly away home." It's the hard forewings that give a ladybug its shell-like covering. The hindwings underneath are used for flying.
The high-water mark for ladybug love may very well have been in 1977 when the New Hampshire legislature named the two-spotted ladybug as that state's official insect. (Massachusetts, Ohio, and Tennessee had already made ladybugs their state insects.) In 1989 New York designated the nine-spotted ladybug as its state insect. The native species was believed to be widespread and common in the state.
There are some 450 native species of ladybugs in North America, and several thousand species in the world. New Hampshire has about 60 species within its borders, and Vermont has about 40. Almost every one of those species is a beneficial insect, eating plant pests that we would otherwise use chemicals to kill.
But sometime in the 1990s the worm, or maybe in this case the larvae, began to turn. (Ladybug larvae are spiky looking things, sometimes as long as mom and dad.) Ladybugs have always overwintered as adults in large groups, sometimes even in people's houses. As the 1990s went on more and more people in the eastern, Midwestern and northwestern US were complaining about hundreds or thousands of ladybugs entering their homes in the fall.
While the two-spotted ladybug had always done this to some extent, the new culprit was the multicolored Asian lady beetle, AKA the Halloween ladybug or Harmonia axyridis. This ladybug is a tree-dweller, originally from Asia. As the name suggests, it comes in a variety of shades, from yellow to orange to red.
This ladybug had been released time and again -- in Georgia, Ohio, Washington -- throughout the 1970s as a natural predator of crop pests. When few were recaptured, it was thought they had died out. But they had just flown away to new homes. The good news is that these ladybugs did such a number on the pecan aphids in Georgia that chemical pesticides are no longer used for aphids there. The bad news is that every fall they find their way into American homes, sometimes in horror movie-like numbers.
Ladybugs don't eat inside your house and they don't reproduce there. They are just seeking a warm place for the winter and an exit in the spring, which may be a small solace when you find one doing the backstroke in your coffee.
They can be kept out by tightly sealing your house, including putting screens over your vents. If they are already inside, ladybugs can be sucked up with a vacuum cleaner that has nylon stocking inserted into the extension wand. The ladybugs that get in your house are usually non-native and even over-abundant, so do what them what you will.
Just don't crush them. They stain. And don't eat them.
"They taste horrible, which is part of their natural defense and why many of them are brightly colored -- an example of aposomatic (warning) coloration," says John Weaver, who, as an entomologist with the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, I trust did not arrive at this knowledge through his own experience.
He says that wine makers have found that when the Halloween ladybug gets harvested with the grapes, the crushed beetles taste so bad that they can ruin the wine.
We won't be rid of the Halloween ladybug any time soon, but we seem to have learned our lesson. Weaver reports, "the U.S. Department of Agriculture seems to have adopted new guidelines in selecting new lady beetles for introduction, selecting species that are specialized predators and not selecting species that are generalized predators."
Introduced ladybug species don't just bug humans. They impact other ladybugs as well. New York hasn't seen its state insect in years. It's believed that an introduced species, the seven-spotted ladybug, may have done it in by eating it or out-competing it.
It's a little harder to love a ladybug these days, but it's a little harder to be one too.
- This article was originally produced by Northern Woodlands magazine with support from the Upper Valley Community Foundation's Wellborn Ecology Fund.
