Insects can be good for your garden

"Bugs" are often regarded as the enemy to gardeners. However, there are some insects that are beneficial to your plants.

To start with, there is no "good" or "bad" in the world of nature; it just "is." But in your garden you have to make choices, so it's best to take the time to understand the results of your "good" and "bad" choices before taking those actions.

The most important arthropods in your garden are the pollinators, insects that flit (some crawl) from flower to flower. If you want to witness it happening, go out to your garden on a late summer night and watch the beautiful lined hummingbird moth come swooping in and poke its long, straw-like proboscis into your blooming plants. What a beauty!

Native pollinators are best, but the European honeybee is right up there with them - while all our native bees are pollinators.

Probably the most significant and noticeable are the well-known and hard-to-miss bumblebees. Please be assured, the very last thing on the bumblebees' mind while they're frolicking for pollen in your strawberry blossoms is stinging you. You do not have to swat at it or in any way make a threatening gestures, just accept the bee for what it is: a friend making its own living while helping you to grow your healthy and robust veggies.

Instead of removing (or spraying) all the plants around your garden, leave a wide variety of native plants for our native pollinators. Believe it or not, even the feared paper wasp and infamous yellow jackets are pollinators; the male yellow-jacket lives on pollen alone.

This a bold statement to make, but there is not one spider in your garden that can hurt you - unless you fall over a rock trying to get away from it. Spiders will only do better what pesticides are supposed to do. Day and night, ground spiders are devouring insects that burrow in the soil, eat the roots of your veggies, and other harmful insects emerging from a pupa case or cocoon - such as the cucumber beetles and cut-worm moths that do so much damages to your garden.

Wolf spiders, jumping spiders, grass spiders are all on your side, especially the orb-weavers. If you don't believe it, reread "Charlotte's Web," or better yet, watch what's going on among the arthropods in your garden.

Among the arachnids (spiders and their allies) there's a predatory mite who eats plant mites like they're going out of style; they not only eat individuals, but egg cases as well.

Then there's the surphid flies; they're definitely among the gardeners' "good guys." The adults are wonderful pollinators, and the maggots (larvae) are predators that love to eat aphids and caterpillars that eat your garden.

Speaking of flies, the robber fly ranks high on the list as a farmer's friend. They capture and devour grasshoppers and other plant-eaters in great abundance. One of my favorite observations was seeing one snatching a bot fly out of the air, and plunging it's sucking mouth part into that infernal pest.

How about our venerable praying mantids? Now there's a real killer! The female mantid will eat every arthropod it can. She has to, in order to gather enough energy to produce her huge egg sac containing hundreds of her kind. The male is also good at eating insects, but compared to his deadly mate, he's a wimp; she even bites his head off when they're through mating.

Even the so-called stink bugs can do your garden a favor.

Paper wasps and yellow jackets eat insect pests, too, and they especially prefer moth caterpillars. In the fall, yellow jackets are after any kind of meat they can get - they're drawn to the hamburger in your barbecue, which makes them a nuisance - but they' re also after other vulnerable insect pests.

The dainty-looking lacewings are a common insect around Sisters. Adults feed only on nectar, pollen and aphid honeydew (another story for another day), while the larvae are tops at destroying aphids, spider mites, thrips, whiteflies, leafhopper eggs, moths, leafminers, small caterpillars, beetle larvae and a host of other bad guys. They can even be found in greenhouses doing their thing. Their eggs look like a grain of rice glued to the end of a stiff horsehair.

So, please take a moment and identify the creepy-crawlies in your garden; you will be astonished how Mother Nature tries to keep a balance among them all.