Are All Insects Bad?

If you deal with damage from insects eating away at your home like termites or ants, have to avoid the outdoors due to a severe reaction to wasps, hornets & yellowjackets, or worse yet have to repair foundation damage due to termites, the tendency might be to think that all insects are bad. It may come as a surprise for many of you who spend your gardening days or BBQ nights eliminating insects from your surroundings, that insects can actually be beneficial! In our line of business we deal with identifying, eliminating and excluding pests from your property. Fortunately, only a small percentage of insects are labelled pests like the major kinds we deal with including: bed bugs, wasps, hornets, cockroaches, flies, rodents, and termites to name a few. But there are insects and bugs that can be beneficial to your gardens and ecology of your property. Let's take a closer look at those beneficial bugs.

• Ground Beetles- These nocturnal beetles are large, long-legged, shiny blue-black or brown beetles that hide under rocks and logs during the day, and are fast-moving when disturbed. The are voracious predators of slugs, snails, cutworms, cabbage maggots, and other pests that live in your garden's soil. If you are a gardener, these may be a welcome sight for your harvest!

• Lady beetles (Ladybug) - The iconic round, orange/red spotted ladybug is just one of more than 400 species of lady beetles found in North America.These beetles eat aphids, mites, and mealybugs.

• Lacewings - Pale green or brown lacewing adults have distinctive large, veined wings and feed mainly on flower nectar. Lacewings larvae eat aphids, caterpillars, mealybugs, scales, thrips, and whiteflies.

• Hunting and Parasitic Wasps- These small wasps attack the eggs of pests and are one of the most important insect groups that provide control of garden pests.

• Spiders - Spiders have no antennae and two body parts and eight legs. Spiders are an incredibly diverse group with roughly 3,000 described species in North America. All spiders feed on insects and are crucial to preventing pest outbreaks.