Hey, what's up everyone. Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. So if you haven't noticed today and for most days this week we've been talking a lot about different pests and I've been recommending beneficial insects and one of the ones I've been recommending is the lace wing specifically the green lace wing and I know that a

lot of people don't really know what lay swings are and they don't really know why they're such good beneficial insects.

So I figured I would do a profile, maybe on a beneficial insect and not on a pest today.

So today we're going to look at the lace wing.

Now what are they?

First of all, the adults actually aren't very good.

They only eat pollen, aphid, honey dew, nectar, etc.

But the lacwing larva are the things that we really want in the garden.

Those eat eggs, those eat many of the early larval forms of a lot of the pests that we run into in the

garden, so aphids for sure, spider mites, thrips, leafhoppers, a lot of beetle larva, which we've covered

over the last two days, and even mealybugs.

So honestly, they're one of the best general purpose beneficial insects you can have in the garden.

So how does it work?

Well the larva will actually feed for about two or three weeks.

So you have about two or three weeks of predator time for each lacwing larva.

Then what they do is they spin a cocoon and then they become an adult 10 to 14 days later.

So they are super cost effective. You can kind of think of them as like a

biological program that runs in your garden and just champs on all the stuff that you

don't want. So that is a quick little overview of lace wings. I would

really recommend picking up some lace wing eggs from either a garden store or maybe ordering them online.

And then creating an environment in which

the lay swings want to stay in.

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