Good and Bad Bugs.

Posted by Ena Clewes
November 18th, 2007
Filed in Garden Pests and Diseases
Tags: aphids, beetles, bugs, flowers, garden, pests, plants, slugs

 Organic gardeners divide the insect world into two camps:
 good bugs and bad bugs

 The bad bugs bring death, disease, and destruction,
they suck the life out of plants, infest
the soil and lay eggs by the thousands.

The good bugs remind me of an army of
peacekeepers, who come marching in bringing
peace and harmony.
They work quietly, taking care of the bad bugs
by munching on them and generally getting
rid of your enemies for you.

Now, you would think that bad bugs would
look horrible and good ones would be pretty
but that is not always the case i.e
A ground beetle, which eats slugs, is distinguished
from a darkling beetle, which eats plants,
by a ridge on its head from which the
ground beetle’s antennae protrude.

Now, I don’t know if you have ever tried
to get down and close enough to a beetle
 to see this difference, I haven’t, and I don’t
think I really want to!

A friend of mine once wiped out an entire
cache of yellow eggs on the underside of an aphid-
infested leaf, thinking that she was
destroying the young of an evil Mexican
bean beetle, however, she really destroyed
the nursery of a ladybug, whose eggs would
have eventually hatched and would have turned
into an army of hungry aphid eating larvae!

I think for weeks, she must have apologised
to all the ladybugs in her garden.

I am good at giving advice on how to get rid
of bugs in your garden, but I really
don’t like to kill them.
I hate to pick slugs off of a plant, and then have to
decide what I am going to do with them.
. I feel the creature moving in my hand,
  and that makes me feel like a potential
  murderer. what if it has babies somewhere? Then I talk to myself and convince the weakling
  side of me, that I have no choice, if I want
  to keep my plants alive.
 Coward that I am, I toss the slug out into
 the street, and hope that it will venture
 into someone else’s garden.
As luck would have it, I actually threw one on to
the road, and a passing motorist took care of
the problem for me, so that is how I decided to
deal with the slug and snail population,
in my garden!

I did try talking to them and explaining
that if they would just leave my plants
alone,  I would not have to take such drastic
action, but I know they were not paying
any attention, so out into the traffic, they went.