Beyond Ladybugs: The Beneficial Insects That Last

How green lacewings found a home in my yard

Reading about gardening with nature, beneficial insects come up a lot - what they are, how to attract them, how to avoid killing them. Beneficial insects will eat other not so helpful insects and still provide a food source for those animals that depend on insects for their diet, like birds for their young. No poisons, no damage to the environment, good for balance.

So it would seem obvious to buy and release some into your yard or garden, right? Well, it's not that simple. One of the most talked about beneficial insects is the ladybug, or more properly, lady beetle. It's beautiful, charismatic, stars in movies, and both the adult and larval forms eat pests.

In my experience, though, they don't stay around. I've never released ladybugs myself, yet at least three times my yard benefited from a ladybug release somewhere in the neighborhood. Those little spotted red beetles were all over the place. But they didn't colonize or reproduce, and after a few months they were gone.

[Picture: Green lacewing at rest on the wall]
So what did stay? Green lacewings. They are also beautiful, with pale green, lacy wings that reflect their name. And they're also effective at pest control.

I released lacewings into my yard many years ago. They didn't seem to have a direct effect on the garden that was the target, but they settled into the trees and shrubs and thrived. Before the 2021 Texas Snowmageddon took its toll, the ash tree in my front yard had branches stretching across the driveway. I used to watch swarms of lacewings at night, backlit by a street light, fluttering in and out of the ash tree leaves. Quite a sight.

A large colony apparently also lived in an old, huge hackberry tree in the backyard. Later in 2021, that tree split, as hackberries often do, fell on the roof, and had to go. The lacewing population dropped so sharply that I thought they had died out. I contemplated another release, but within a year or so, their numbers recovered. Now I see them almost every night when I go out back after dark, hovering on those fast beating wings.

Great to have such hardy, helpful, beautiful creatures in my yard.