No Bad Bugs

I was recently out in the garden with some young folks, showing them my favorite native plants. I pointed to a stem of swamp milkweed teeming with neon orange oleander aphids and said, “Look, this one has friends!” One of the students who had some experience helping in her backyard vegetable garden looked at me like I had two heads.

“Aren’t aphids bad?” she asked, incredulously.

I tried to explain to her that aphids are the base of the insect food chain. That they convert plant carbohydrates into protein. That they are nature’s chicken nuggets. But she couldn’t shake the orthodoxy of aphid=pest=must remove.

She’s not alone. People ask me all the time- about oleander aphids especially. They say they want to grow milkweed for the monarchs, not this random little sap-sucking pest. But ecological gardening doesn’t work that way. You can’t choose to garden for the pretty insects and exclude the icky ones. Insects- ALL insects- are essential to life on Earth. They are our foundation.

If we want to support them, we must be willing to accept what they do. And what they do is eat plants.

Oleander aphids are not a native species, which makes them maybe a less-suitable example, but they seem to have integrated pretty seamlessly into our local ecology. Their top predator is the Asian Lady Beetle, a generalist hunter who prefers aphids but will prey on more desirable native insects if times get tough. They also serve as hosts for parasitic wasps; hardened brown aphid “mummies” are the evidence of wasps at work. Lacewings, syrphid flies, and other garden predators are all attracted by the flashy orange aphid mobs.

So, for any gardener concerned that a “bad” bug is enjoying their milkweed before the good bugs can, my advice is always to just wait.

Resist the urge to react to every perceived problem in your garden and you will be rewarded with the natural checks and balances of a healthy ecosystem.