Having over the years been brainwashed by the articles we read and the many warnings we get from various speakers at the monthly meetings of my local Fuchsia Society to be vigilant and spray when we spot bugs, do we ever wonder whether it is only the 'baddies' that we are killing off?
I expect that just like me you are somewhat puzzled by the absence of the usual vast army of ladybirds in our garden this spring? The ladybirds, and especially their larvae with that ferocious appetite for greenfly, were badly missed in my garden. In previous years I have at times been going round collecting some of them to introduce into my greenhouse to deal with a small outbreak of greenfly. (Yes, it works, combined with the fingers and thumb squash'm method and is much more fun than spraying) Or if only one or two plants were infected I have just stood them outside for a few days and found they were given a nice spring-clean by nature's workers. This year unfortunately I could not resort to this friendly way to deal with the aphids problem (yes, bought in, again!). And I was certainly also mighty annoyed to find that spraying with a variety of products presently on the market did not actually rid me of this plague, the horrid aphids were actually not green at all but a rusty orange, and obviously prided themselves to be real tough guys.
Let me add here, that I have several greenhouses, the pest only infiltrated one greenhouse were I kept my recently acquired plants - my poly tunnel, and the greenhouses containing sales plants were not affected.
I was at times thinking of praying for those thick swarms of ladybirds we experienced a few years ago, but of course we have never seen them in such quantities again, have we?
Now as said I presume that the natural cycle has, somewhere along the line been disturbed by unseasonable weather patterns, but, do you realise that ever so many ladybird larvae are actually killed off by gardeners themselves. Many of whom unfortunately seem to adopt a policy of 'it's Sunday, let's spray'. All too readily they resort to this unnatural way of dealing with bugs, and in the process also exterminate the beneficial bugs instead of applying the selective technique of squashing baddies only.
I have to admit that the ladybird larvae do look pretty ugly, but they do eat vast quantities of aphids, scale insects and mites, to fatten up and then lay their eggs which will hatch out to perpetuate the cycle of life. We are all most familiar with the common ladybird which is reddish-orange and has seven black spots, but there are actually numerous other ones, with different numbers of spots and different colours too. I have seen yellow ones, but there are also brown ones.
Unselective spraying doesn't only kill ladybird larvae, but other beneficial bugs are also put at risks, like lace wings and hoverflies. Lace wing larvae as well as devouring vast quantities of greenfly also have spider mites and thrips on their menu. Hoverfly larvae again have an incredible appetite, each of these brownish green creatures good for gobbling up hundreds and hundreds of aphids before becoming an adult, who then in turn is capable of laying in the region of a hundred eggs!

While the above mentioned creatures are widely available, so kindly provided free of charge by our creator, there are nowadays also several predators being marketed, available at a price. If applied at the correct time and maintaining the right temperature for their survival they can eliminate the pests that they were brought in to deal with.
A big disadvantage though, must be that after these predators, like e.g. the Encarsa Formosa recommended for whitefly, have devoured the vast majority of your pest, there will not be enough food left for them to survive. Hence they will die due to lack of food and the few remaining whitefly e.g. could (with the terrific rate at which they breed) quite easily lead to another infestation in a few weeks time, when you have to fork out again to re-introduce the predators. Or you have to do the unthinkable and actually as the Encarsa Formosa population deteriorates reintroduce plants or foliage infested with whitefly eggs!!
There are also predatory mites available that likewise 'deal with' the dreaded red spider mite, such a plague in hot summers, and another biologically deterrent is the introduction of nematodes, which apparently do the job below the surface, taking care of vine weevil grubs.

P.S. I Have since been informed by our learned friend Mike Oxtoby, that those horrid orangy intruders were in fact peach potato aphids and they are indeed incredibly difficult to get rid of. He could of course have added that this served me right for not having bought all my new acquisitions from Oxtoby's Fuchsia Nursery, but he is too much of a gentleman to do so. I certainly wished I had though! CD 1999