ALMOST BEEKEEPING - RELATED TOPICS > GARDENING AROUND THE HOUSE

Ambush bugs

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Shawn:
After getting my pollinator garden up and running I started seeing weird bugs near the blooms of most of the flowers. I found they were ambush bugs and started pulling them off. I know they are good and bad but once I noticed they were there I stopped seeing so many bees. Any idea on how to get rid of them so they are not killing the bees?

Shawn:
Flip side of this I have been seeing a lot of dead wasp in the plants.

The15thMember:
My sister saw one of these in the garden the other day and didn't know what to call it.  Thanks for bringing them up, it saved me a lot of digging around on the internet to ID it.  :happy: 

I doubt the ambush bugs are having a significant effect on the bee populations.  There isn't a lot of literature on this, but just basing it off mantises, which hunt in a similar manner to ambush bugs, I'd imagine that each ambush bug is only eating a few insects each day, and obviously not all those will be bees.  If you are speaking of seeing reduced numbers of honey bees, that's probably happening naturally in your area as the summer begins to wane.  In my location, which I'd imagine is behind yours in times of the seasonal progression, hive numbers peak in July and are visibly reduced already by now, and even during the height of summer several hundred bees will die from each hive each day of natural causes.  Even 50 bees eaten by ambush bugs every day is pretty insignificant compared to that.  If you are speaking of reduced numbers of native bees and wasps, many species have very short-lived flying seasons compared to honey bees, and species seen out and about will vary greatly throughout the year.  So it may be that you are simply seeing the natural seasonal cycle progressing slowly toward winter in your area.       

Shawn:
Thanks for the info. I did read that they eat grasshoppers and that is great with me because they were destroying my plants. I just don't like the thought of them even taking one bee and I don't want to spray to kill them off. Ill just continue to pluck them off, I do me pluck because they stick tight onto the leaves. I have never seen them here before in my veggie gardens so I started to think maybe they hitched  a ride from somewhere on a plant I had bought and now they are producing.

Shawn:
Here are two of them

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