Remember also, the young of most beneficials eat plants so, you cannot panic when beneficial wasp larva (rose slugs) appear. You'll have to wear blinders to avoid the damaged leaves caused by them. I respectfully, but firmly disagree with this particular information. The young of most beneficials also eat insects, and often it is only the eating that the young do that is beneficial at all. The adults of many beneficials, especially the little ones, either don't eat anything or eat nectar and pollen. That's why planting a variety of flowers, especially including small flowers such as sweet alyssum, dill, fennel, and yarrow, is useful. It attracts into your garden those little, tiny, just 2 millimeter long wasps you don't even see that are also looking to lay eggs on the aphids and rose slugs eating your flowers. The wasps that are beneficials . They're so tiny you don't generally even realize they're around. They can't even sting because they don't have stingers. . Sawfiles are in the same insect order as wasps (& so adult sawflies do bear a resemblance to wasps), but so also are bees and ants (which also bear a resemblance to wasps). Adult sawflies aren't predatory (& so aren't beneficial), and as immatures (such as rose slugs) they're plant eating pests.

Though I've never used nematodes to try and get rid of thrips, I have used them to try and get rid of japanese beetles. What I discovered is fewer grubs in my garden but still as many on my plants. The problem with the beetles and thrips is they can fly. When I did research on how to get rid of thrips I found information on insects that eat them. One such insect that is easily recognizable is the pirate bug. We were infested with thrips, so much so that I found 30+ on EACH daylilly flower (not plant, flower) and we have hundreds! My new roses couldn't bloom at all, especially my Moonlight Magic, Stainless Steel, and Neptune. I had to clip all the buds as they were so damaged by thrips I was concerned about the health of the plants (ironic how I was more concerned about aphids before this). After reading about the thrip-eating bugs I decided to see if I could find any on the daylillies. I found one pirate bug and it was enough to convince me to wait and see for a few weeks. 5 days later and two of my roses have bloomed today. I inspected them for thrips and found 2-3... and a pirate bug. Pirate bugs are my roses new best friends and I, at last, can enjoy some blooms! They haven't yet finished up the population on the daylillies, but I haven't given them much time, either. If you decide not to get the nematodes you should consider predatory insects.

Cornell University has a informative website about beneficial insects. This should help you identify what pest you have so you know what beneficial to apply. The key is to apply beneficials early in the season or when you first notice any bugs. Start with a generalist predator such as a green lacewing. The Chrysoperla rufilabris does better in the higher humidity in Florida than the Chrysoperla carnea. I make three applications every two weeks to ensure you establish a good population. If your problem persists, you might have to get a specific predator to target the particular pest you have. This is when it starts getting expensive. Usually, however, if you apply lacewings early, it will not come to this.

In general, you will not have a lot of predators lurking around before the bad guys show up. Why? Because most beneficials eat bad bugs. In the absence of bad bugs, the predators aren't there first because there's nothing for them to eat, and it is hard to survive without something to eat. That is why there is almost always a lag in time between when pest insects show up and when beneficial insects show up to devour them and, in fact, the number of pests has to reach a certain level (enough to sustain a population of predatory beneficial insects) first. This often is discouraging to new gardeners. Aphids, for example, appear first. Then, their population skyrockets. You might see an occasional adult lady bug feeding on them, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to determine that there's far more aphids on your plants than a couple of lady bugs here and there can eat. This is the point where a new gardener usually panics. If the gardener is patient, though, once the lady bugs know there's a heavy enough aphid population to sustain their young, the lady bugs will lay eggs and suddenly you'll have lots of ladybug larvae crawling around all over everything (they look like little gray alligators at that stage), devouring aphids and any other tasty bugs they come across. Sometimes it is hard to be patient and wait for the lady bugs to reproduce, but it pays off. Lady bugs that have overwintered or that are released can be an exception in a way because the adult lady bugs can feed on nectar or on a manmade food called wheast (whey + yeast + sugar or whey + yeast). Green lacewings sometimes will feed on wheast too. You can buy a wheast mix at places like Arbico organics that sell lady bugs or you can Google and find various recipes to make your own. Sometimes a sugar/water spray also works. However, no matter how much wheast you have available, the lady bugs will not reproduce until there's enough of a pest insect population to feed their young. Here's several recipes for homemade food products that can attract some beneficial insects to your garden: Recipes To Attract Beneficial Insects There's more to it than just either attracting or buying/releasing beneficial insects though. They have minds of their own and come and go as they please, meaning they often don't stay where they've been released if you buy/release them, and even the ones who show up voluntarily will come and go as they please, generally (but not always) as the pest population flows. Green lacewings are another very beneficial insect. Sometimes I have a lot. Sometimes I see almost none, and that is typical It just depends on what pest insects you have in the first place because there's got to be some pests to attract them. They are relatively easy to buy and release, but if you release them too early before there's a pest population to feed them, you're wasting your money because they'll fly away as well. Spined soldier bugs are highly beneficial but like the others, they show up en masse only when the pest population warrants it. I usually see only a handful of them in spring, but by mid- to late-summer, there's a lot more of them. They feed on larger insects and are very, very important in a garden. Predatory wasps are important, and most predatory wasps are tiny, so tiny they often are mistaken for flies or other pests themselves. One very important role they play in the garden is the control of various kinds of caterpillars, particularly those that appear very early in the season. Paper wasps (Polistes spp.) are the largest predatory wasp (about 1" long) 've ever seen in my garden. The adults collect caterpillars from plants and carry them back to the wasp nest where they feed them to their larvae (adult paper wasps feed on nectar, honeydew or other sugary substances, not the caterpillars they bring to their young). They take a wide variety of caterpillars back to their nests, including corn earworms, imported cabbage worms, cabbage loopers and hornworms. Trichogramma wasps are at the other end of the size spectrum, about 1/50" long, but they are very important because they feed on many kinds of caterpillars. Adult trichogramma wasps will lay their eggs in/on pest insects. Once their eggs hatch, the larvae tunnel their way through the pest insect, essentially eating it from the inside out. They prey on many kinds of caterpillars, and are easy to buy and release in the garden. Another important predator is the soldier bug (spined soldier bug) which, unfortunately, looks a lot like a brown stinkbug, which often gets it in trouble with gardeners who think it is a pest instead of a beneficial insect. Soldier bugs kill pest insects (including insects larger than themselves) by inserting their proboscis into the targeting pest and sucking out its juices. They feed on a wide variety of pests, about 100 different ones in all, including corn earworms, Colorado potato bugs, flea beetles, Mexican bean beetles, cabbage loopers, fall army worms, beet army worms, and many more. In my garden, the spined soldier bugs usually start hatching out at almost the same time that the leaf-footed bugs start hatching, and the larvae are almost identical to one another. It can take a while to learn how to recognize which bunch of the larvae are the good guys and which ones are the bad guys. A lot of people like to use preying mantids as beneficial insects. I've tried it and was not very impressed with them. They are voracious eaters and will eat everything in sight, including all your other beneficial insects and then they will turn on each other and eat one another until there is only 1 praying mantid left. In that sense, they are not all that beneficial because they wipe out a lot of the beneficials your garden needs over the long term, and are a waste of money because no matter how many praying mantids you buy and release, only the Grand Champion remains at the end. Truthfully, the best way to attract beneficials before pests show up is to have winter-blooming flowers (including weeds---the lady bugs love whatever they find on henbit on sunny winter days) to attract them even before pest insects show up. Some of the best early-season plants in my garden that attract beneficials are henbit, comfrey (it tends to stay green all winter or, if it freezes back on very cold nights, it puts out new growth almost immediately), kale, catnip, catmint and lemon balm. Chamomile reseeds readily and appears very early and I see lady bugs on it a lot, probably in the February or March time frame. The same is true of other early volunteers I see in the garden, including tansy, silver tansy, dill, fennel and bronze fennel. You won't really know what beneficial insects you need, in general, until you plant and see what pests show up. Once you get your soil in balance and it is healthy and grows healthy plants, you won't see all that many pests compared to what you have in the early years in soil that is low in organic matter, low in natural fertility and somewhat imbalanced. The one thing that has helped my plants more than anything was just getting the soil to the right point---once that happened, my huge population of green lacewings virtually disappeared because there weren't enough pests to keep them around. It took me a while to accept the disappearance of the green lacewings as a good thing---but it was a good thing. It isn't that we don't have pests in our garden, but rather we have so much fewer now than we once did. Notice that I didn't mention grasshoppers? The best predator for them is wild songbirds, but in a bad hopper year, the birds get tired of them and stop eating them. The best way to control them out here in the country is to use an organic product containing the protozoa, Nosema locuste, that kills them. It only works in relatively cooler temperatures and on the smaller instars, so I mostly use it in the April-May time frame in the years that I use it at all. Remember other predators that will prey on insects too: song birds, lizards, turtles, frogs, toads, some non-venomous snakes, etc. I'm never lonely when out in the garden because there's always a whole herd of these creatures out there with me. Turtles are one of the best predators around when it comes to Colorado potato bugs. Who knew? I certainly didn't, until I repeatedly observed a turtle traveling up and down the potato rows, day after day, devouring them. That went on for years and years but then we built the beds taller, lined with hardware cloth, to exclude the voles, and unfortunately the height of the beds excludes the turtles too. Hope this helps, Dawn