Ladybird larvae - here today, gone tomorrow

[ChingfordHarry]

Hi

yesterday, my field beans were absolutely covered with 7-spot ladybird larvae - there must have been thousands of them, because each leaf had 5 or 6. Today there wasn't a ingle one. There was, however, one solitary harlequin ladybird larva.

Any ideas what might have happened to them? Although most of the blackfly that were there before appear to have gone, presumably eaten by the larvae, there are still plenty left to provide more than a healthy snack.

[Jungle Jane]

Those harlequin ladybirds eat our native seven spot ladybirds,there is probably both types about,I remove the harlequins I see (about one a year here) & put them in the front garden by the path so they don’t nest here. I rarely see them but some areas have more than others. Maybe they’re pupating somewhere tho…

[ameno]

Harlequin ladybird larvae will eat native ones in theory. However their propensity for doing so has been overstated. In practice, they will unusually only eat native ladybird larvae if they run out of other food, especially the 7-spot, which is almost as big as they are (assuming the same maturity, of course). There's certainly no way a single harlequin larva could eat anywhere near that many.

More likely, either the 7-spots were already nearly fully grown and have now pupated, or else something else ate them (a bird, perhaps, or else they fell off and a ground beetle or something then ate them).

[ChingfordHarry]

I didn't know that birds ate them in any great quantities - there's almost nothing on the interweb that says they do, but I guess that once a bird had seen them, there would have been more than enough to keep coming back. I suppose that I thought they had a rather unpleasant taste like the adults are supposed to have.

Somehow, I can't imagine the thousands that must have been there all falling off unless they were displaying Disney-sequel lemming behaviour..

BTW, I wasn't blaming the harlequin larva for eating them them - just making a note that it was the only one left when ther hadn't been any obviously there before. From what I've read, harlequins got a lot of bad press (like a lot of recent immigrants) but they turned out to be not such a problem.

[ChingfordHarry]

"Disney-esque" lemming-like behaviour

[Babru]

I ordered ladybird larvae online last year. They didn't get a chance to deal with my greenfly as they quickly vanished and I believe were killed by ants, who I assume were harvesting the greenfly. On further research I did find out that I needed to get rid of the ants first.

[Bren In Pots]

This has been an informative thread but just a reminder about posting during the server change.

"The period of time in question is 19th-21st June, as previously mentioned, you will be able to post on the forum as normal, but once the update is complete anything posted in that period will be lost"

https://www.growfruitandveg.co.uk/gr...te-update-info