Are garden insects good or bad to have around? If you want to protect your garden from pest infestation, know what insects should go and what should stay. Later, we’ll also discuss how to protect your garden from the bad ones as well.
Beneficial Insects
Also known as beneficial bugs, these insects are great to be around in the garden because some aid in pollination and others work as natural pesticides. In addition, they can increase a garden’s ecological diversity and defend your crops and plants from harmful and dangerous insect pests.
A few of them are the following:
Bees
They collect and carry pollen from a flower to another, aiding in cross-pollination important to produce more seeds. With them, more plants and flowers will grow and you will end up with a productive garden.
Praying mantis
Mantis, which is a slow moving and solitary insect, can catch a prey with its front legs and eat larger grasshoppers, beetles, crickets and other harmful garden insects.
Ladybugs
Also called lady beetles, the adult ladybugs can get rid of crop pests, such as mealybugs and aphids. Their eggs, which they lay among pest insects, later become larvae that feed on the harmful insects, too.
Braconid Wasps
The female adult injects its eggs into moths, caterpillars and aphids, among other harmful insects. Later, the larvae feed inside the hosts that eventually die once the larvae become adults. Bring them into your garden by planting nectar plants, such as wild carrots and dill.
Lacewings
The larvae and adult lacewings feed on harmful insects, including mealybugs, caterpillars and aphids. A few other preys for these insects include the sweet alyssum, cosmos and whiteflies.
Harmful Insects
Some garden insects have to go away – and these are the harmful insects that pose a threat to a garden’s vitality or a danger to plants and animals. Some of them include the following.
Spider mites
These vicious insects can injure the plants badly within a short span of time. They feed on them by piercing their leaf surface to extract fluid and leaf cells.
Aphids
They’re some of the most harmful pests in the garden because they come together and suck on the fluids of plants that the latter need for nourishment and growth.
Cabbageworms
You must get rid of these insects especially if yours is a vegetable garden of cauliflower, broccoli or cabbage. These insects can eat the bases of these vegetables without you noticing until the crops die. They also feed on foliage, leaving plants only with large veins and stems.
Dangerous Insects
These garden insects can injure and damage the crop. Some can also cause pain or injury to humans, such as carpenter or black ants that can sting, leading to discomfort when it injects its formic acid into the skin. A few of these dangerous insects also include the following.
Venomous spiders
They can bite when feeling threatened, which can cause skin swelling and irritation. Examples of venomous spiders are the black widow and brown recluse, which venom is considered more lethal than that of a rattlesnake.
Immediately, venomous spider bite can cause severe itching, breathing difficulty, nausea, muscle pain and vomiting.
Wasps
You won’t like these insects around that sting when disturbed while looking for food. They also do sting several times, unlike a bee that does it only once, when defending their nests. They do it by injecting their venom into the animal or human skin using their stinger. Unfortunately, a sting can be serious for allergic people.
Scorpions
They can sting and cause discomfort, swelling and other symptoms, yet some can be lethal, too. If their population becomes uncontrollable, you should call up a professional pest control company that knows how to eliminate garden scorpions effectively.
How to Protect Your Garden
There are many ways to protect your garden from pests. One is to attract beneficial insects, including ladybugs, lacewings, bees and praying mantises, into your garden. In addition, you should get rid of sickly plants, which are ravaged either with a disease or by harmful insects.
However, DIY efforts might not be enough if the pests’ population becomes uncontrollable and have the tendency to move into your home.
For the best results, you should seek the help of a pest control company that can get rid of different types of garden pests using proven and customized approaches. They can use either or a combination of chemicals and baits to get rid of garden pests.
Hiring the pros also eliminates the guesswork on your part. There is no trial and error for them because they’re trained and experienced in identifying different pests and proper ways to get rid of them. They can also provide a quicker result rather than you trying to eradicate the pests yourself can.
Overall, professionals can ensure the maximum effect of a pest control method or treatment by also detecting the main infestation source.
There you have what to know about beneficial, harmful and dangerous insects in your garden. There are some worth keeping and some should be eradicated.
