I have been keeping ladybugs (or ladybirds as we call them in the UK) for many years as a pest preventative. Ladybugs are omnivores, which means although they love to mostly eat aphids, they will eat just about anything in your garden including themselves if they can't find there favourite food source. They are also partial to eating mites, but if you have a serious infestation of them, your better off going for a specific mite predator, as ladbugs will help, but will not eat the numbers required fast enough to fight off a major infestation. Keeping a population of ladybugs in your garden is pretty simple to achieve, they act as great prevention for just about any garden pest. Having a living population in your grow room means they will kill off just about any pest before it has a chance to take hold. Ladybugs will happily live off a non meat based diet and in order to keep ladybugs in your garden when they have no natural food all you simple do is cut up some raisins and soak them in water, they love them! Also make a small shelter for them, I have a wooden insect house which I hang in the grow room. As long as they have shelter and a constant source of food, they will stay around. ======= I have recently moved house and I need to now start a new population of ladybugs for my new grow room. I am going to start them from larvae and thought I would document them growing up into adult ladybugs and make it a little project to post on here. Here I have 25 Adalia Bipunctata larvae, which is a species of ladybug common to the UK. They came supplied with about 75,000 aphid eggs as food. This will keep the larvae busy until they are adults. You don't want to keep these anywhere near your grow room though, having aphid eggs anywhere near my garden always makes me nervous. Its worth washing your hands after touching them too! I have a pretty bad infestation of white fly so I stuck a leaf of my dying basil plant and put it in as extra food, its covered in white fly eggs. There is no real need for me to do this, I just felt like punishing the little bastards for killing my basil plant
Been looking into buying some. Don't want them to get everywhere in the damn house, but thrips are a bitch and a half and ladybugs would be a nice, chemical-free way to get those buggers to fuck off once and for all. Although I read that Asian Lady Beetles which look almost identical bite. So I am hesitant to let any I catch go in my house, or to holdthem to move them now in case they are the wrong kind lol. >.<
I find the odd one around the house but they generally stay around the food. Not sure where you live but its pretty easy to order them as larvae or fully grown online
I released the larvae into my garden as I had picked up a slight whitefly problem. I have not seen the larvae or anymore whitefly since. Today I caught the first sighting of an adult, so I'm relieved to know that they are growing up. I have placed raisins around the grow room which should keep them in food and hopefully encourage them to breed. Here are some photos of the adult I spotted (excuse the pun) today. Afraid all I had to hand was my mobile so the pics are not the greatest Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Awesome thread mate. Do they really eat thrips? I thought they would be too small for them to be interested. Are they attracted to the light at all? The reason I haven't tried them is because I have heard they kamikaze the light bulb. I tried some predatory mites to tackle my thrips and although they did keep the population down I don't know how to breed them and spending £17 every month buying them didn't appeal to me
I have plenty of both, Lady Bugs and the Asian biters. For some reason they like to land on me, especially in my bedroom. That's how I know about the Asian's. Recovering from surgery one landed on me. My wife goes, that's good luck, then the damn thing bit me! Yesterday though, I'm picking up a 12 and the bag boy goes 'Sir, you have a lady bug on your shoulder'. Wasn't overly surprised, but he seemed impressed. He picked it off and released it outside. Seemed more impressed when I told him about the organic garden. Young white guy with dreadlocks, you could almost see the gears turning in his head. My neighbor and I split an order of lady bugs back in 2009 and there have been plenty ever since. Never bothered to re order. Would like to order some Mantids though. I see some, but would like to see more. They are so cool. @[member="GoldGrower"] Yes, they will kamikaze the light bulbs. The T-5's I use inside don't seem to fry them, at least I don't find dead ones below the lights. But, HID will cook them in a heartbeat. Wet
I'll be changing over to an air cooled hood in the next week or two. They might be ok with that perhaps, do you think?
They can be retarded at times, sometimes they go into the lights and fans! It's a numbers game, constant top ups if you can. Yeah they eat thrips, they will just about eat anything I find, sadly that includes any other natural predators you might have Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum
Oh, LadyBugs...I had such high hopes during our very first grow when we were hit with mites and tried every organic method...the hours spent rubbing each and every leaf daily and the karmic load I'm carrying from all of the killing..after releasing hundreds of the ladies I thought I would get relief, but alas, they were only attracted to the white panda wrap and white table tops, had to manually corral them onto the plants, where they would sit for a minute before flying off. They eventually died, probably from starvation. It's nice to know that other growers have had good luck with them. I'll stick w/the rosemary oil method.
if you have spider mites bad enough to require lady bugs....blocking light is the least of your worries.
Like I said in my opening post guys ladybirds will not help you with a spider mite infestation.. They can help stop you getting one, but if the mites are already established they will replicate themselves much faster than the ladybirds can eat them and reproduce themselves. The balance will go in the mites favour. Ladybirds will eat mites but it is not there preference, unleashing hundreds of them onto a spider mites infestation is not a solution. However if ladybirds are present when the mites first land on your garden, you have a good chance of them stopping an infestation Sent from my iPhone using Grasscity Forum