My house is being overrun by ladybugs. I know they are good for the garden but that’s where I want to keep them. I have tried sealing any openings in the house and have tried to vacuum them but it doesn’t help. Any suggestions?
— Larry Koster, Lansing
“Believe it or not, vacuuming them is the best thing you can do when they come into the house,” says Joe Braun of Rose Exterminators in Chicago. “No one wants to kill ladybugs because they do so much good for the garden.”
There’s another reason why people don’t want to kill them.
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“Remember,” says Braun, “ladybugs are beetles.
“If you bring someone to kill the ladybugs, then they will die in the walls of your home. The dead bodies of these beetles will attract other beetles into your home, and you will have bigger problems.”
Braun says ladybugs prefer the south and west walls of homes and come into homes in early fall. They come in any hole or opening they can find. In March and April, they start to come out.
“You want them to come out of the walls. You really don’t want dead beetles in your walls.”
In the fall, Braun suggests hiring an exterminator to power spray the exterior of your house and around the eaves and windows, concentrating on southern and western walls, to prevent another invasion of ladybuygs. The spraying doesn’t kill them but wards them off and points them in another direction.
Then the ladybugs, which many believe to be a symbol of good luck, will have no choice but to live up to the old nursery rhyme that goes: “Ladybug, ladybug fly away home.”