How to use bugs to enrich your soil and enhance the life of your plants. A gardener's guide to managing these organisms.
Dictionary.com defines the word "beneficial' as an adjective "Conferring benefits; useful; profitable; helpful; advantageous; serviceable; contributing to a valuable end; -- followed by to. And "insect" as a noun "Any of numerous usually small arthropod animals of the class Insecta, having an adult stage characterized by three pairs of legs and a body segmented into head, thorax, and abdomen and usually having two pairs of wings. Insects include the flies, crickets, mosquitoes, beetles, butterflies, and bees. Or any of various similar arthropod animals, such as spiders, centipedes, or ticks."
It's fairly straightforward that a "beneficial insect" is a bug that is useful to your garden, farm or crops. "Wait a minute! Bugs is bugs! The only good bug is a dead bug!" But that simply isn't so. There are many varieties of bugs which are not only not "bad" they are very good for your garden.
For example, several species of miniature wasps parasitize the tomato and tobacco hornworm. The adult wasp lays eggs on the surface of the worm and as they mature, they suck the insides of the worm out to nourish themselves, eventually hatching into more parasitic wasps. Granted, this is stomach wrenching to think about, but don't kill those hornworms! You want those wasps to hatch out and grow up and go lay eggs on even more hornworms. The hornworms will defoliate your tomatoes. The wasps deflate the hornworms quite effectively without effort on your part.
What the gardener or farmer wants to do, rather than spraying poisons which will kill all the bugs indiscriminately is to implement a strategy which uses beneficial insects to the fullest. This means that the gardener must attract them to her crops. Beneficial insects need two things: habitat and food.
Habitat is a fancy way of saying "home." A habitat is a place for beneficial insects to live, reproduce and to winter over. Different species of beneficial insects have different kinds of habitats. One common habitat is stands of wild flowers. Planting wild flowers in wide avenues around your crops is a very attractive way to cultivate beneficial insects. Mostly the habitat also provides food for the beneficial insects. Some beneficials eat pollen, some eat nothing at all.
You can learn more about beneficial insects by calling your county agricultural extension office and asking which beneficial insects are most common in your area. You county extension agent may even have ideas about how to attract these insects to your crops. If your county extension agent does not know, go to your local library as ask the reference librarian or look up the particular insects you have on the internet.
Remember the next time you are about to reach for the chemical pesticide: you might be killing exactly the insects that you most want to cultivate. Beneficial insects are on the same side you are. Don't kill them, give them habitat and food near your garden or crops and watch your pest population drop. Make beneficial insects welcome on your farm today.
