Friday, September 28, 2012

Lady bug invasion!


Our street is crawling with Lady Bugs. I'm not sure what they're up to or how long they're planning on staying but I'm pretty sure I've never seen this many Lady Bugs in one place. There must be a hundred or more lady bugs on every tree in the street, it's like a Lady Bug convention or something! Seb and Isobel seems to love it and after spending the best part of an hour the other night staring at the tree outside our house I literally had to drag them away and pick the lady bugs off their clothes and out of their hair before they came back inside. 
I had perviously heard that the city of Victoria releases Lady Bugs in their thousands as a natural means of preventing aphid invasions or something and I'm wondering if the town of Beaumont has done the same thing. Does anyone know anything about swarms of Lady bugs??? I'd be very interested to find out. 











1 comment:

Anonymous said...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14043356

Yours look like big ladybirds. So long as they are not these Harlequins which can bite apparently. Plus they eat up all the food that our native ladybirds in the uk need to survive. Farmers here are now banned from importing European Harlequins to use as pest control on their crops.

Apparently ladybirds do swarm, usually when their food of choice, aphids, are plentiful. Trouble is when the aphids are all gone the ladybirds die. Google "ladybirds swarms" and you'll see there were lots on the Norfolk coast a couple of years ago. Holiday makers couldn't leave their caravans! Don't know why as our ladybirds don't hurt you. I do recall when I was about five that a bush in our garden was just covered in them. Maybe Seb and Isobel will recall these ladybird covered trees in 40 odd years time!
GG

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