Lately we’ve been noticing ladybug action going on around here like we do every year. Every year we just sweep 'em up and hold our breath because it stinks. And not to mention that those little buggers bite! Do any of the teeming millions have any suggestions how to get these things out for good?
They are not real ladybugs. Real ladybugs don’t bite. Seriously.
This Staff Report may be of interest: Are toxic orange ladybugs the latest environmental threat?
Interesting report on ladybugs, bibliophage. Was staying in a hotel earlier this year on an upper floor. There was a notice from the hotel apologizing for the ladybugs that somehow got into the rooms. I noticed about 8 of them. They didn’t bother me, so I left them alone for that week. No bites. Now I’ll pay more attention to color, etc.
I dealt with this particular invasion a few years ago at college in New Hampshire. They weren’t our good old red little ladybugs though…they were brown icky looking things. They came in through holes in the screen of the window in my dorm room (scary enough they still managed to get through when the windows were shut). They would congregate around the window and on my ceiling. They did’t do anything to me, but they were disgusting all the same. They would die and fall onto everything in my room, even my bed. Then the crunching would start…I stepped on so many without knowing it…they left brown stains and weird smells. I guess they’ve been showing up more and more every year…someone mentioned that they are a foreign strain of our dear innocuous red ladybugs.
The ladybug is hippodamia convergens, but the convergens doesn’t mean the bugs converge, it means the spots do, I think. My question is why did they get this name Hippodamia? Hippodamia was a Greek myth character whose father didn’t want her to get married so he made everybody run a chariot race with him. After about 10 had lost and he killed them, Pelops came along and Myrtilus a servant of some kind took out the cotter pin from the king’s chariot, and thus Pelops won the daughter and they got married and later ruled the kingdom. This was after Pelops’ father Tantalus had killed him and cooked him for a dinner which he served to the gods, but the gods knew about it except for one or two of them and reconstituted him except for his shoulder, which they replaced with ivory. Hestia or was it Demeter had eaten the shoulder. In theDemeter ate the shoulder version, it was because she was so distraught over her daughter being missing, as it was that time when Pluto came up from the land of the dead and kidnapped poor Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, who later could come up to the land of the living part of the year but had to reign with Pluto the rest of the year, like the seasons. Since Persephone’s ladies in waiting had not cried out when Pluto came along in his chariot to wing her away, the gods punishede them by turning them into the Sirens, who have the heads of women and the bodies of birds. They lure sailors to the rocks and eat the mess from when they crash into the rocks. Odysseus had himself tied to the mast so he could hear what the girls were singing, knowing that the emotions are stronger than the reason, though not stronger than ropes. Thus he alone has lived after hearing the song of the Sirens. Now why did they name these beetles after Hippodamia?
I’ve found that the best way to get rid of them is to suck them up in the vaccuume(sp?)
The Voice of Experience Speaks
Do not, I repeat, do not squash the little orange-brown devils. They are filled with orange-brown innards that leave a very unpleasant and somewhat permanent orange-brown stain.
Living in the midst of soy bean fields, we are over run with them. The Extension Service says that now that the aphids them live on have been frozen out the beetles are looking for a place to spend the winter, preferably in the walls of my house.