My wife had a shocking discovery the other day when she saw that she had so many aphids on her herb garden. It kind of sucked because we are competing for the best herb garden container and these aphids literally were sucking the life out of her herbs. So we clipped as many leaves as we could and quarantined her herb garden to micromanage every aspect of it's growing life. As I was doing some inventory on the rest of the garden I came across this Guy hanging on my herb garden. I immediately wanted to squeeze the life out of this guy. But as looked closer I saw these huge pincher's on it's head. Common sense told me that something equipped with huge pincher's might just be on my team. So I watched this guy for some time and took some pics and did some research and found out that what I have patrolling aroun
d my herb container is in fact a Green lacewing in the larva stage and this guy is commonly known as the aphid lion. I think it should be reclassified as the aphid saber tooth.The Green Lacewing which I had no Idea lived in my garden is not as predacious as it's young. The Green lacewing lays it's egg on leafs and when the young larva fully emerges the aphid lion larva gorges itself on every bug that is attacking your garden namely aphids. Before I started doing some research on these guys I need to be punched right in the jaw, because i think I have killed at least ten larva in the cocoon stage stuck to a leaf. So my advise is to be careful, we want to kill the bad and help the good.
Hands Down Lace wing larva are the most important predatory species in the garden. This is my opinion and I believe so because of the variety of harmful insects they eat. From spider mites to moths. These guys do not discriminate.
1 comment:
I'd like a few of those :)
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