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How to deal with leaf beetles
Leaf beetles are bright beetles that look like ladybugs. It is difficult to eliminate these leaf pests with chemical reagents without harm to your own health.
How to deal with leaf beetles using their natural enemies
These insects live where there is foliage: their habitat is wide. There are about 30 thousand different beetles belonging to this family. They differ in size, color and culinary preferences. Some bugs feed on fresh leaves and ovaries, others on fallen leaves, and still others prefer animal corpses.
Leaf beetles are brightly colored and visible on the leaves.
It is not difficult to recognize them. They are quite bright and colorful. The sizes of beetles can be from 3 to 12 mm. Adults do harm to plants, peeling off the layer from the leaf and leaving a hole, while the larvae eat up the leaf itself.
Initially, these beetles settled on weeds. Man deprived them of their habitat, sowing these areas with cultivated plants. Insects have also mastered new crops. By the type of preference, insects are divided into:
- onions;
- mustard;
- mint;
- strawberry;
- rapeseed;
- shitty;
- viburnum, etc.
Beetles can damage foliage, stems, buds. They do not touch the fruits. The larvae can gnaw on the roots, but they do not cause much harm to them.
Beetles usually hibernate under trees in fallen leaves or shallow underground, emerge in April-May. After a while, the females lay a bunch of eggs. These eggs are eaten by ladybugs, bugs and wasps. The larvae that emerged from the clutch feed for half a month and go to pupate. In the same season, the next generation of beetles appears.
In nature, these insects make up the diet of many birds: warblers, flycatchers, blackbirds and woodpeckers. The larvae are eagerly eaten by moles and shrews. They are loved by different types of frogs and lizards. If you allow the birds to nest in the garden and create the conditions for this, there will be much less problems with insects.
Other measures to control leaf beetles
Beetles get on leafy vegetables from nearby weeds, so the first thing to do is to control the weeds. These preventive measures are quite effective, but there are others:
- in the fall, dig up the bed and the side of the road to destroy the larvae and beetles;
- in June-July, loosen the soil in the aisles;
- collect beetles by hand by brushing them onto a cardboard box with glue;
- burn plant residues after harvest;
- wash the larvae off the leaves with soapy water;
- sprinkle the leaves with wood ash or mustard;
- use a covering material such as spunbond at the beginning of the plant’s growing season.
The beetles are quite visible on the leaves, so they are easy to spot. In case of danger, they squeeze their paws and fall.
If preventive control measures do not help, do not drive birds, frogs and lizards from your sites. These volunteers will cope with various pests as well as chemical preparations.