Lady bugs show up early in my garden. I see them on dandelions and white clover and bolted brassica. Several companies have "mixes" designed to attract beneficials. You want something to feed polinators when most things aren't yet blooming yet, like over wintered and flowering brassica. Here is a link that may help, and a list of good border plants. Farmer Fred's list. An extensive list from Mother Earth News and a good article also from M.E.N.

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

Thank you. Great information, as usual. The web pages, such as Fred's list is very interesting. I had never heard of Wheast before.

I will plant a variety of attractors for the good guys and see what happens.

How exciting. I am in Denton regularly and lived there a few years on and off since 80. I can't picture any land near the square off hand. I was just there eating at a little place on the square at thanksgiving.

Anyway I hope it works great for you. Sometimes the first year is a little more sacrificial until you get your good bugs built up. I plant 1/3more than I need just to make sure I get some. Lol

I'll have to do that (plant extra). Too bad I can't put a sign up directing the pests to their portion.

Yes, Denton's a cool town and as you know they did a terrific job renovating the square some years back. It looks like there's at least .75 acres of contiguous open turf, only part of it going along with this rent house. Still, for all I know, whoever has the rest may be willing to let us grow things. The Food Not Lawns movement is getting some traction and the sod is just sitting there empty, I'm sure to be developed at some point.