If you’re keen on organic gardening and natural pest management, then one of the best things you can do is to attract lacewings to your property. Their larvae are ravenous eaters and will happily keep your plants startlingly pest-free. Read on to discover five great tips on how to attract them and keep them around.
Why is it Important to Attract Lacewings?
Lacewings will be some of your best friends in organic gardening and natural pest management.
They’re members of the Chrysopidae family and are invaluable allies pretty much worldwide. The reason they’re so important is because they feed on many of the insects that can wreak havoc on your crops, including (but not limited to):
- Mealybugs
- Thrips
- Aphids
- Whiteflies
- Spider Mites
- Scale insects
- Leafhoppers
- Caterpillar and beetle eggs
While adult lacewings consume nectar from various species, their larvae are voracious insect eaters. One single lacewing larva can hoover up about 200 aphids every week, in addition to the other harmful species mentioned above.
When you think about how much damage any of those pests can do to your garden, consider how beneficial a host of lacewings can be!
Add to that the fact that adult lacewings pollinate plants as they flit around, devouring unwanted insect pests. As such, they’re double-duty allies that move pollen where it needs to go while keeping your plants safe and healthy.
Fortunately, it’s incredibly easy to attract lacewings: you just need to offer them their favorite food sources, shelter, and water.
How to Attract Lacewings to Your Garden
There are a few ways to entice these lovely insects to your garden or homestead. Since there aren’t any classified ads you can use to hire them, your best bet is to provide them with the most delicious and appealing environment possible.
Put these tips into action and you’ll be sure to draw them from near and far.
1. Plant Several Indigenous Flower Species
Since these insects live everywhere on the planet except Antarctica, they’ve spent over 200 million years evolving and adapting to consume the nectar of flowers indigenous to their surroundings
As such, you’ll be able to attract lacewings to your space by providing them with plenty of native plant species.
Check out books or websites that list the flowers that are native to your area, and plant them all around your space. If some of them are good companions to the vegetables or fruits that you’re growing, interplant them between rows. This will encourage pollination while also helping to keep unwanted insect populations down.
As an added bonus, some of the indigenous flowers you plant may also attract braconid wasps. These will work in tandem with the lacewings to eliminate the insect pests that would otherwise destroy your crops.
Learn more about native plants (nativars) and why they’re beneficial.
2. Create Lacewing Habitats for Shelter
If you want to attract lacewings to your garden, then it’s vital to provide them with adequate shelter. This doesn’t just keep them comfortable in inclement weather but also keeps them safe from various predators.
These lovely insects aren’t just predators for unwanted pests: they also get preyed upon by birds, mantids, lizards, frogs, assassin bugs, ants, and spiders.
As such, they need little habitats to shelter and lay their eggs safely. You can either buy a ready-made insect hotel for them to move into, build one yourself, or provide them with little nooks and areas that they can claim as “home.”
These insects prefer elevated habitats, so situate your bug house or habitat about three feet above soil level. Ensure that it gets some sunshine during the day rather than full shade, in a spot surrounded by the aforementioned native plant cultivars.
This will ensure that they’re safe from predators while having abundant food sources nearby.
For a DIY tutorial on how to build a lacewing or bee house, check out our article.
3. Offer a Safe Water Source
If you aim to attract lacewings, it’s vital that you have a safe water source available for them. Water is as important to insects as it is to birds and mammals. Lacewings, butterflies, and bees drawn to your garden will appreciate having a few watering areas available to them.
The easiest type of waterer to create is a shallow dish filled with marbles, pebbles, or small rocks. This design offers the lacewings safe bits to stand on while they’re drinking so they don’t fall into the water and drown.
Make a few of these to place around your property, and check on them every couple of days to ensure that there’s water in all of them.
Additionally, be sure to clean these waterers regularly to prevent fungal or bacterial infections from potentially damaging or killing the local insect population.
For additional ideas on DIY insect waterers, read our related article.
4. Purchase Eggs
If you’d like a surefire way to attract lacewings, this is an almost no-fail approach. You can buy lacewing eggs from many garden centers, nurseries, and online suppliers, and then simply follow the instructions on how to release them safely and effectively.
For example, you’ll want to release them at dusk because these insects are primarily nocturnal. Release them in areas where they’ll have a food source available the second they emerge from their eggs. As such, you can sprinkle the eggs onto foliage that aphids, caterpillars, and so on are devouring.
Check the leaves regularly to see whether the eggs have hatched and if the larvae have been busy devouring the insect pests nearby. If you find that little has changed, then the eggs you bought may have been duds.
Should this be the case, purchase another batch from a different supplier and try again.
5. Avoid Broad-Spectrum Pesticides
If you’re aiming to attract lacewings to your garden to deal with unwanted insect pests, avoid using pesticides. Commercial chemical insecticides are particularly damaging to them, but homemade options also affect them.
Should you absolutely have to use a natural pesticide for a specific pest species, target only the affected plants rather than hosing down your entire garden.
For example, deal with cabbage white butterfly larvae on your brassicas with Bacillus thuringiensis instead of drenching everything in sight with Neem oil. Essentially, the pesticides that’ll turn moths and other bugs away from your garden will also repel lacewings, and we don’t want that.
As you can see, it’s incredibly easy to attract lacewings to your space, and your entire property will benefit as a result. Plant a wide variety of indigenous species for the sake of biodiversity, interplant these species around compatible vegetable, fruit, and herb species, and watch your entire homestead thrive.
