What's going on epic gardeners? Thanks for tuning in again. My name's Kevin. I'm the founder of epic gardening.com. It's some of the best gardening information you're going to find on the internet and I'm only making it better day by day. So go check that out please and let me know what you think. All right today we're talking about five bugs that are actually good for the

garden. This is a rare thing right beneficial? Beneficial bugs are some of the most overlooked things in a garden.

A lot of people like to talk about all of the bad bugs that they hate,

but there are bugs that of course are good for us and especially good for our gardens.

So I'm going to run through five of them quickly.

First and most obviously are bees.

hashtag save the bees. We need bees. hashtag save the bees.

We need bees.

There's a lot of crops that are pollinated almost

primarily by bees, melons, pumpkin,

squashes, apples, tree fruits. A lot of those are pollinated by bees. Bees do most of the heavy lifting there. Without

them you would have to pollinate all of these by hand and that's not only time consuming but it's just less efficient if a bit of nature can do it for you in the form of bees, why would you not want that to happen?

So how do we get bees in our garden?

Well you can plant a variety of flowering plants that are bee attractors.

You can leave your soil unmulched to attract ground bees.

You can have a shallow water source.

You can leave a dead tree standing.

There are a lot of different ways to attract bees, but that would be the subject of another episode.

The second bug, lace wings. They destroy all the bugs that you hate.

The adults and the larva of lace wings will... all the

adults and the larva of lace wings will eat aphids, scales,

thrips, mealy bugs, and caterpillars.

...