Master Gardener: Preventing winter tree damage, Southwest Tree Injury

Ladybugs have to be one of our favorite garden visitors: right up there with butterflies and bees. Technically, ladybugs are called lady beetles or ladybirds although I don’t remember the last time, I heard someone call them ladybirds. Even though there are approximately 450 varieties of lady beetles in North America, the one we are probably most familiar with is the convergent lady beetle aka Hippodamia convergens Guérin-Méneville, but let’s just stick with lady beetle.

The good news is that lady beetles are great for your garden since both the adult and grub-stage larvae are voracious predators of other insects. While they have a wide variety of insects they will dine upon, the one we are perhaps most familiar with is the aphid. An adult lady beetle can eat up to 50 aphids a day, which is good due to the rate at which aphids can reproduce.

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