This Year, Why Not Zap Your Bad Garden Bugs with Good Ones?

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The nice thing about mantids is that they'll adapt to virtually any setting and eat anything that moves. Although their favorite foods are flies and grasshoppers, you'll find that praying mantises will—from time to time—also consume aphids, leafhoppers, white grubs, beetles, chinch bugs, and several species of caterpillars.

LACEWINGS

Because of the disagreeable (to humans) odor that they sometimes give off, lacewings are often referred to as "stinkflies". In the adult stage, these fragile-looking, light-green insects are primarily nectar lovers (although some are known to be carnivorous) and are thus of little importance as agents of biological control. The lacewing's larvae —otherwise known as aphidlions —however, are a boon to the gardener: They have a gluttonous appetite not only for aphids but for mealybugs, mites, leafhoppers, thrips, moth eggs, bollworm larvae, whiteflies, and scale insects.

If you should discover lacewing eggs in your garden (look for very tiny, ovoid eggs suspended on threadlike stalks, usually on the undersides of leaves), count yourself lucky!

DAMSEL BUGS

The small, brownish-gray damsel bug (a close relative of the ambush and pirate bugs) is a common inhabitant of fields, orchards, and gardens everywhere. (Look for them in the shadows of leaves or flower petals.) Don't let these insects' small size fool you: They'll more than do their part to keep aphids, leafhoppers, lygus bugs, spider mites, treehoppers, and small caterpillars in check in your pea patch.

SYRPHID, TACHINID, AND ROBBER FLIES

It may come as a surprise to you to learn that the fly family has many beneficial (to gardeners) members . . . but it's true. Three types of flies, in particular, merit special attention: the syrphids, the tachinids, and the robbers.

Syrphid flies—commonly known as hover flies or flower flies—resemble bees more than they do ordinary flies . . . and—like bees—adult syrphids live entirely on flower nectar and honeydew. Syrphid fly larvae, on the other hand, are "meat-eaters": They have voracious appetites for aphids, scale insects, and other soft-bodied bugs. A single syrphid fly larva will, in fact, easily consume an aphid a minute, given the opportunity. (Not bad, considering the larva's small size and total lack of sight organs! )

Adult tachinid flies—which (at first glance) look like overgrown houseflies—spend most of their time buzzing from flower to flower, and sipping nectar like bees . . . since, as adults, they're strict vegetarians. Every mature tachinid, however, passed its larval stage as an internal parasite of some other kind of larva . . . such as that of a butterfly, moth, grasshopper, army worm, bollworm, wood louse, or centipede. (In Hawaii, one species of tachinid larva has been successfully employed as a biological control against the troublesome sugarcane weevil.)

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