Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Good bug, Bad A!! bug
When you hear crickets, what’s your first thought? The joke bombed, yes, but after that? Loud and fairly ugly bugs?
Think again. Think nutrient cycling. These guys are called detrivores. They eat detritus, the plant parts that have died and fallen off the plant. They then rid themselves of the plant in their waste which then goes into the soil, enriching it for the other plants. We can attract them by leaving a layer of leaf litter as mulch.
From the moment the Assassin bug hatches, it’s a killing machine. There are several kinds as you’ll read about in that link from the University of Wisconsin.
They eat insects including the dastardly Japanese beetles and stinkbugs by using their mouthparts to pierce the soft areas between the exoskeleton and sucking out their innards! And more from the University of Maryland.
The little hover fly seems like it would be useless but au contraire! the larvae eat aphids.
Tachnid flies look like bristly houseflies and all of them are parasitoids, they kill their hosts! They help keep garden pest populations down!
Parasitic wasps are not choosy, they attack and eat all insects, including mason bees, but their favorites include aphids, mealybugs and caterpillars.
And then there’s the Robber fly. It’s known as the shark of the insect world. A powerful predator, they dart from perches and catch grasshoppers, dragonflies, wasps and even Japanese beetles. They paralyze their victims with venom.
And finally, the Winsome fly… a killer of Japanese beetles that I wrote about last year.
I just JB yesterday… on my leadplant.
Rather than killing insects willy nilly, it’s a good thing to know WHO you’re dealing with.