Ladybird

How to recognise it

Everyone knows the domed red-and-black adult. Almost nobody knows the larva - and the larva eats far more. It looks like a tiny black alligator, 5-10 mm, spiky, usually black with orange or yellow spots, crawling fast over the leaf. There is also a pupal stage: a motionless orange-and-black blob glued to a leaf.

Mistaken for

The larva is very widely mistaken for a pest and squashed on sight. The bright yellow clusters of eggs on leaf undersides are mistaken for pest eggs and wiped off. And the motionless pupa is often taken for a scale insect or a piece of dirt and scraped away.

What it eats

Aphids, Scale insects, Mealybug, Red spider mite, Woolly aphid

How to attract it

Leave the first aphids alone so there is something to eat. Grow flat open flowers - fennel, dill, coriander, calendula, yarrow, phacelia. Leave hollow stems and leaf litter standing over winter for hibernation.

Plants that help

Fennel (herb), Dill, Coriander, Calendula, Phacelia, Yarrow

Lifecycle

Eggs to adult in about four weeks. One larva eats several hundred aphids on its way; an adult thousands over a season. Overwinters as an adult, often in clusters in dry sheltered crevices.

Months: March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October

The thing people get wrong

If you learn to recognise one thing from this whole app, make it the ladybird larva. It is the hungriest aphid predator in your garden and it looks like something you would instinctively kill. A garden that recognises the larva needs a fraction of the spray of one that does not.