I’ve been cleaning up my yard for spring, and I have approximately 10,000 ladybugs in my back yard. Any ideas what they’re all doing back there? Should I do anything about them (as far as I know, ladybugs eat aphids, and I’m all for that)?
Now that it’s spring they’re in your yard where they should be. Wait until fall when they all crawl into your house.
OTOH, I’ve heard that skunks eat ladybugs.
They did that a little bit last fall - I had a couple in the house, but I didn’t mind. It’s supposed to be lucky. 
(And I’m hoping that ladybugs eat spiders.)
So, ladybugs to eat the aphids, and skunks to eat the ladybugs?
Ladybugs are predatory and hang out in soybean fields all summer. In the fall the fields get picked and ladybugs are displaced in large masses. They then look for shelter for the winter, which is often people’s homes.
It seems to me that at least 9 out of 10 of the ladybugs are goldbricking.
The lady bugs are just waking up from hibernation. They will soon disperse on their own in search of food. No need to push them.
Of course! You should chant
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.
Your house is on fire, your children are gone.
All except one, and her name is Ann, and she crept under the frying pan.
10,000 times. 
Hey, I never heard the “Ann under the frying pan” part. Regionalism, perhaps?
Sorry, Cat Whisperer, but spiders eat ladybugs, not the other way around. But hey, spiders are supposedly lucky, too - or rather, it’s unlucky to kill one. (Again … “supposedly.”) But around these parts, I consider it a sin to kill anything that eats mosquitos.
Oh oh - I just bagged up a whole bunch of them in with the dried grass and leaves.
There was an old lady who swallowed an aphid…
Are you near any major university/agricultural area? They’re often deliberately released by farmers. When I was at Penn State, the Ag school would release massive numbers of ladybugs into some of their test fields, etc., as pest control. Thousands of them would wind up basking in the sun on the side of the dorms.
No, not that I know of. I’m a couple of blocks away from a large natural area (Nosehill Park, for any Calgary Dopers), but other than that, just a regular suburb.
Are they red or orange? The orange ones that swarm your house are evil – they smell bad, they bite, and they’ve pretty much displaced the red ladybugs I remember from my youth who minded their own business and didn’t invade the sunny side of my house. I first remember seeing these Asian Lady Beetles swarming my windows when they attacked my bedroom window in a particular house I was living in in Southern Illinois, which puts it around 1990-1991. There were so many, so suddenly, they pretty much darkened the whole window. Since then I’ve almost always ever seen these orange invaders, and nary a real red ladybug.
http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef416.asp
(bolding mine)
If you’ve got real native ladybugs, you should cherish and encourage them. These orange monsters I suck up out of my windows with the vacuum cleaner so I can trap them back out in the cold to die at night (or squash them en masse, but then they stink).
Hmm - let me go look - okay, they’re a dark, brownish orange - mine only have five black spots, though. I guess those are the bad ones. 
They sell them them at Home Depot, etc. After years of people buying them the population is out of control: well large anyway.
If they actually sell the ones that are listed in that link (not passing off non-native imposters for whatever reason), those would be the good, non-building-infesting, non-hibernating ones.
What do they do to the man bugs?