Ladybugs

I've been battling whiteflies now for a couple of months. They're these little, white, soft-bodied pests that suck the lifeblood out of your plants like a hundred tiny replicating vampires. While school was in session, I didn't have much time to think about my whitefly invasion. Compared to exams and papers and presentations and grading and teaching, whitefly control didn't seem very important.

But now that my life consists of biking, gardening, cooking, and studying for the M.A. exam next Fall, I spend a lot more time worrying about my whiteflies. Sterling accuses me of being like Rabbit of Winnie the Pooh, fretting over my garden, pulling at my ears, de-bouncing Tiggers, etc. I really have tried all kinds of solutions: I made some insecticidal soap from water, vegetable oil, and dish soap. It did practically nothing. I then bought some commercial insecticidal soap. It decreased the number of flies somewhat for a while, but though I continued spraying my plants occasionally over the course of a few weeks, the whiteflies began to grow in number again.

I then made some yellow sticky traps, of various kinds. I stuck pieces of yellow cardboard on chopsticks and covered them with tape, sticky side-out. I cut pieces of clear plastic, colored them with yellow Sharpie, and coated them in petroleum jelly. No luck. The whiteflies were still more interested in my tomatoes.

I bought a marigold plant, which supposedly repels whiteflies. The whiteflies took up residence under its leaves.


So finally I broke down and bought 1500 ladybugs from the Internet. They arrived about a week ago (I'd forgotten what I'd ordered and freaked out when I opened the package to find a bunch of insects) and I released them onto my plants. I've been a little disappointed, though. They've mostly just hung out in huge groups between the leaves of my gardenia. Whiteflies will land millimeters away from the cluster of beetles, who will continue to sit there, totally uninterested.

I'm hoping that they're crawling around and eating whitefly eggs when I'm not looking, but the number of whiteflies that flutter off my plants in a disappointing cloud seems to keep growing and growing.

The other possibility: my ladybugs are simply more interested in chillin', maxin', and relaxin' all cool than in scarfing down my flies. An artist's representation: