Customer Reviews

Lady Bugs

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How could ladybugs be bad? Well...

My ladybugs arrived in a regular cardboard envelope. My husband thought I ordered a CD or something he'd like, so he ripped it open before I could stop him. His reaction alone was worth the cost of the bugs, which is good. Because here's what happened afterwards:

I opened the little mesh bag of bugs and discovered more than half of them were dead. I'm assuming they weren't killed when my macho police officer husband shrieked like a girl and threw the bag across the kitchen; most of them looked as if they'd smothered in transit. Maybe it had something to do with sitting in my metal mailbox in the sun before Mr. Strong Alpha Male opened them without permission. Granted, there were 2 or 300 more of living ladybugs, so I wasn't too worried. I only have four tomato plants. How many bugs did I really need?

I let them out at the base of my plants at dusk as per the directions, stopping to cover the carcasses of the deceased with dirt; the next morning I went out to my tomato plants, expecting to see aphid carnage and ruin. Instead, I encountered a ladybug orgy.

Um. Guys? Wanna do your job?

I swear, there was a bug there with a video camera and a link [...] or where ever they send their clips. It was lust on the vine. And how to explain to the younger children? I'd wanted to give them an educational experience. But this wasn't exactly the one I had in mind.

The orgy continued for about a week; a few of them made their ways onto a plant to wander around and around and around the wire tomato cage, lost and hungry.

Two weeks later, I realized my purchase had flown away and I decided: Ladybugs are great if you don't mind a cluster of corpses at the base of your plants. They're also wonderful if you're willing to accept that living things have their own agenda and your desires have no part of it. They're also fantastic if you want to freak out your nosy husband; I'm thinking about ordering something bigger, with more legs, for the next time. But, if you have a serious aphid problem, no netting to keep your ladybugs on your plants, have aversions to bug porn or don't have a passion for being pesticide free, I'd recommend the poison.

These are not your ordinary orange brown asian beetles that you get at home depot, nor the flat beaked ones pictured from other parties, these are bright red and come with a full chiseled pattern on their black and white collar. The house container is an authentic replica of woodland environs, including woody string, hay, cottony stuff, and as long as you release the ones trapped by closing the lid all of them are healthy. Just don't keep them in the fridge for long, they will turn a rattly dull copper and with all the lightweightedness, static, etc., of death. Also, insecticidal soap seems to have brought down a large number of them on my roses