What can you do with a house full of ladybugs? Not much

The sunny weather we have been having over the past few days is bringing with it a horde of insects. Ladybugs and their close cousins, the Asian lady beetle, are showing up in swarms in people’s houses.

They have adapted to spending the winters inside the walls of buildings including homes, and when the weather starts to warm up, they emerge. They intend to enter the great outdoors but many take a wrong turn and end up inside. The Asian lady beetles are the real problem.

“Well, I find them a real pain in the neck, they’re always falling on my plate at suppertime and they make the food bitter. If you grab them, they kind of bit you or they’ll put a liquid on you that smells,” says David Beresford, an entomologist with Trent University’s biology department.

Beresford says both the common ladybug and the newcomer Asian lady beetle, attack and devour aphids which themselves attack and devour crops like soybeans. The lady beetles are being imported into this country as a bio-control for aphids but they present problems as well.

“The last 20 years, they’ve been around as an invader, seasonal invader, nuisance pest. There’s not a lot we can do about them, there’s  no registered insecticide at this time, probably won’t be, because the domestic ladybugs are beneficial,” says Mike Miller of Miller Pest Control.

Both Beresford and Miller say you can control them by vacuuming the bugs up and releasing them outside but they noted that the bugs will keep blundering around your home until the weather warms up and the bugs find their way to the outdoors.