I've seen ants fight off ladybugs. They ganged up on the poor girls. Beyond that, here's a dissenting voice about buying ladybugs. Some researchers believe that native population are damaged because the only reason they can be sold is to have someone collect them while dormant. Further, the most common response after release, is to fly, fly away home. (They're genetically programmed to do so.) Further, far too many die on the shelf before they are even sold. (That's bug abuse!) Much better to enhance their population in your garden with plant diversity and lots of small flowers where they and other beneficial insects can obtain pollen & nectar. Cheaper, too.

All of us here are well aware of how beneficial they are in gardens, but they can become pests if hundreds or thousands of them decide they want to spend the winter indoors with you.....so just be aware of that when cold weather is approaching in the autumn or winter. I just take the time to gather them up and release them in the barn or the greenhouse. When you let them stay indoors, they can create a stinky situation after a while, so I'd rather not let them overwinter in the house. If you have pest bugs around that the ladybugs like to eat, they ought to show up on their own, unless you live in an area where pesticide use or something else drastic has either killed them all or driven them away. I usually see about two weeks of fairly heavy pest insect population growth before the ladybugs show up, lay eggs, and give you tons more ladybugs. The larvae don't look at all like ladybugs----they look like little gray alligator-shaped or dragon-shaped insects----and sometimes people don't realize that they are the ladybug larvae and kill them. It is the larvae that really devour tons and tons of pest insects like mites, mealy bugs, leafhoppers, scales and aphids (and many others as well). If you've never released ladybugs before, be advised that often they simply fly away shortly after being released. There's a couple of ways to encourage them to stay around: 1) be sure you do have pest insects for them to eat. If you release them before the pest insects are present in sufficient numbers to feed them, they'll just fly away. They won't stay if there's not a big enough food supply to feed them and their children. 2) You can Google and find recipes for wheast or you can buy some wheast from some of the same places that sell ladybugs. This is like fast food for lady bugs (and also for green lacewings) and helps encourage them to stay on your property if there's not yet enough pest insects to eat. You mix it up and spray it on the plants and it gives them a food source to feed upon before the pest population is sufficiently large enough to feed them. 3) Release them in the evening and, if you wish, release half of them one day and the other half the next day. Scatter them around the yard or garden instead of just dumping all of them out in one spot so that they won't feel like they are in an overpopulated area. Lady bugs are great. Yesterday I saw the regular orange ones, and also some pink, red and black ones in my garden. They were particularly busy on the corn and cabbage plants. Finally, to encourage them (and other beneficial insects) to show up in the first place and then to stay, it helps if you are growing plants with tiny flowers that they can use for a food source (pollen and/or nectar). I usually have the following growing in my garden for the ladybugs: calendula, coreopsis, sweet alyssum, dill, fennel, tansy, statice, silver tansy, marigolds, yarrow and cilantro. Outside the garden there's also wild carrots and dandelions in bloom. I also tend to let lots of my other herbs go into bloom periodically (lemon balm, catnip, catmint, an onion here and there, etc.) for the beneficial insects. They need water too and if there isn't any available, they'll leave to find it. Right now, with all the torrential rainfall in Oklahoma, we have lots of standing puddles of water, but I usually keep shallow pans and a birdbath filled with water for the beneficial insects, with the bottom of the pan and birdbath filled with pebbles so the little ladybugs can perch on the pebbles to drink without drowning. Normally, once you've attracted local ladybugs to your garden, or once you've successfully released purchased ones and had them stick around, you'll never be without ladybugs again. Even when it seems like there are not many nearby, they are there, even though they won't show up in large numbers until there's a sufficient food supply available for them.

Hi Donnaroe: Great question, I learned too as I looked up the info., from Buzzle "Lady bugs eat aphids. By the time a ladybug dies, it consumes about 5,000 aphids. The other bugs that it eats are boll worm, broccoli worm, whitefly, mealybugs, armored scales, pit scales, mites, tomato horn worm, and cabbage moth. They also like to eat eggs of other insects like moths. They enjoy eating pollen and mildew. You may even find some species of ladybugs that eat mushrooms and other types of fungus. There are over 5000 species of ladybugs on earth ... Its life span is about 3 to 6 weeks. In its short life span, one insect lays up to 1000 eggs. All ladybugs are born black. The larvae take only a week to develop into adults" Read more at Buzzle: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/what-do-ladybugs-eat.html See below link for the cheapest place to buy lady bugs from Amazon, 1,500 bugs for $15. It has the instruction on how to release them .. this place has the highest rating. Once you click on the below link, scroll ALL THE WAY down to see the 227 reviews. Ed in Amazon wrote this: "1. If you release them in hot weather you will not see them EVER. These guys look for cool spots and will leave no matter what. 2. Sugar water does no good. If there is nothing for them to eat they are out of here. 3. If you have a aphid problem this is far the way to go. *** From Strawberryhill: When we first moved to our alkaline clay we had tons of lady bugs. When I had the most perennial flowers, I had the most lady bugs. But pink yarrow and bee balm are too invasive, so I killed them. We went from tons of ladybugs, to very few. The reason? Lady bugs can hide under flowers, to keep cool and to avoid being eaten by birds. Once I killed the perennial flowers, I destroyed their shelter. From eHow: Planting annuals and perennials to provide nectar for ladybugs will help make your garden an attractive place for both beneficial insects and humans. Choose annuals such as alyssum, baby's breath, calendula, cosmos, marigolds, sunflowers and zinnias, all of which grow easily from seed. Perennials such as bee balm (Monarda), goldenrod (Solidago) and candytuft (Iberis) also attract ladybugs. Read more: http://www.ehow.com/info_8248651_flowers-attract-lady-bugs.html#ixzz33aDO6BmW Here is a link that might be useful: Best place to buy lady bugs from Amazon This post was edited by Strawberryhill on Tue, Jun 3, 14 at 9:44

Farmgardener, If you can find a supplier with good reviews, then why not buy them and release them? Your assessment that the recent heavy rainfall that dragged on for months and months may have negatively impacted your area's population of beneficial insects sounds logical to me. Why wouldn't they have been washed away in the floods? (After the flooding of 2007, we went about a whole year without seeing a snake. I thought maybe it was just us for whatever reason, but when I started talking to other people who were outdoors a lot---like our electric co-op linemen and such, they said they weren't seeing snakes at all either, and they were just as happy about it as we were. So if snakes can wash away, I bet insects certainly do.) We have not had the heavy rainfall a lot of y'all have had (before today's rain showers, our soil moisture level was down to a measly 0.08, which is pitiful) or it stopped months ago so the side effects have faded. I do remember a point this spring (maybe in March or early April?) when I looked around and felt like all insect populations were down--bad ones and good ones alike--except for stink bugs, which are here in such a huge population that I cannot even begin to describe it accurately---I have said we have 100 times as many stink bugs as usual, and really, that is not an exaggeration. Our good insects have shown up, but they seemed late to arrive in good numbers. Lady bugs were always here and fairly prolific, but assassin bugs and green lacewings were kind of late, as were some of the others. Oddly, now that they are here, we have 5-10 different kinds of assassin bugs all over the place, and usually we only have 2-4 different kinds. Maybe they've all been drawn here by the never-ending supply of southern green stink bugs and brown stink bugs. I have noticed a whole lot more bee assassin bugs than usual. Surely this is because we have a huge bee population, but since the bee assassin bugs are bad guys (most assassin bugs are good helpers in the garden), I've been spending quite a lot of time killing them. The insect world is so fascinating....who shows up (or doesn't) and when, where, why and how.... We rarely have aphids, and I think it is mostly because we have so many predator insects that feed on them that I just don't notice them because the beneficial insects gobble them up before they can reproduce much. A couple of weeks ago, I was weeding and looked up and saw oleander aphids on a butterflyweed plant in the garden. I don't think I've ever seen them in the garden before. I got up and walked over to the plant and noticed a lady bug a few inches from the aphids. I returned to my work, figuring the ladybugs would take care of the aphids for me. They did. When I checked the plant a couple of days later, there were no aphids in sight. Who doesn't need lady bugs in their garden? If a lot of your population washed away, I think releasing them would be a great first step to helping them re-establish in your area. Dawn