March Monthly Moos {Lady Beetle Invasion}

Have you heard of the Asian Lady Beetle?  

If you saw one you would call it a ladybug.  I mean they look like a ladybug.  But, they are not red, cute or sweet.  They are brownish-orange, ugly and quite horrible.  And you rarely see one, sweet little bug.  You see hundreds upon hundreds.

The above picture is the window sill in our tack and feed shed.  

We've lived here for five years and I've tolerated them because oh, how I love the South.  And our farm.  And our life in the country.  And our lovely home.  But for some reason this spring, when these Lady Beetles are the thickest, they are just about to make me lose my mind.


Every single day, I vacuum.  Floors.  Windows.  Lights.  Because I have become rather obsessed with keeping trying to keep them out of my house.  (Obviously, from the picture above you can tell that I do not vacuum in our tack shed!)

Without doing any research on them,  here is what I know:

They stink.  You don't exactly notice it until your husband is out of town and to make the house not seem quite so big and lonely you decide to close the guest bedroom door... and open it a few days later to the worst rotten potato smell and realize it is the dead Ladybugs all over the floor, and the live ones on the ceiling and the window.

They bite.  You don't really realize this either until you try to brush one off your neck and you feel a strange sting.

They leave a yellow mark on a white wall.

You can vacuum them off the ceiling and 30 minutes later they are back.

And you continually ask yourself these questions:

Where do they come from?

What do they eat?

Why does it seem like they never die, but yet there are dead ones all over the floor every morning?

So, maybe to make myself feel better about them I began to do some research.


If you do a Google Image search on Ladybugs this is what you get:

Oh... don't they just give you a warm, cozy feeling?


But if you do a Google Image search on Asian Lady Beetles this is what you get:

Not so cozy, huh?


I found out all kinds of disturbing facts like this:


They were imported into the United States to help with the Aphid population.  (But there seems to be varying reports on whether they actually eat Aphids.)


They are considered to be one of the worlds most invasive insects.


They make use of pheromones to "call" each other - hence the huge pileups of them that we see everywhere here in Tennessee.


They have very good eyesight and will tend to go right back to where they were removed from.



Studies are being done on what parasite we can import to help eradicate them.  (Hmmmm.  Maybe Aphids?!)


They tend to be very attracted to light colored houses.  (I'm thinking we need to paint our farmhouse black.)


They can get into anything.  There is just about no way to seal a house up enough to keep them out.


They do not die out in cold weather; they find a place to hibernate and the very second the weather warms up in the Spring, they come out in abundance.


The result of all my reading is this:  I don't feel any better about the crazy things.  I actually feel worse.


And to make you feel worse too, I'll leave you with this video I took of the Ladybugs Asian Lady Beetles in the window sill of our tack shed.

Good night my friends.  I hope you sleep well!


P.S.  I promise a sweet, cozy, happy post soon about our darling calves on the farm!  Smile!