MANKIND'S SMALLEST FRIEND.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume XLV, Issue XLV, 25 August 1922, Page 1

MANKIND'S SMALLEST FRIEND.

(By a Naturalist). "Ladybird,. ladybird. Jiy awav home," sing the village school children, but unfortunately the little red beetle with black spots on his coat of mail does not listen to them. For if it were not for the ladybird the green fly would play havoc in our gardens. There is a strange instructive knowledge in the insect world. "When the ladybird is about to lay her clusters of yellow, cone-shaped eggs, she seeks a plant that the green fly infest. So soon as the egg is hatched the grub,starts out to devour the aphides and eats them until, being full grown, it reaches the pupa stage. This lasts some days, and then the skin splits and the ladybird emerges, and she, too, turns to the green flv or aphis and eats incessantly.

She raises several families, or rather lava eggs several times, her responsibility ending when they are laid in the proper position, and the last broods are ,tn e hibernating ones. They get under the bark of trees in little companies, and pass the winter in a state of suspended animation.

One of the most remarkable sides Nature's economy is seen in the relations between the ladybird and the green aphis. The former keeps the latter under control, and as.e;ich ladybird as larva and beetle must devour many hundreds of aphides, it nnVht be thought that the latter wouJd "become extinct. But if thev did the ladybird would go short of. food and so there a balance is preserved. In some years the ladybird dominates the situation and controls the aphides the natural result is a food shortage, the ladybirds diminish, the aphides multiply.

So fully has the value of the ladybird been recognised in America that in parts where these beetles migrate to the mountains for the winter they are collected in the spring and sold by the pound to the gardeners, whose valley farms would otherwise be attacked by green fly before they would have moved valleywards under the influence of the warm weather. .. Ladybird and green fly afford but one example of the fashion in which Nature' provides the antidote and sets it by the side of the poison. Nowadays we. arcbeginning to win glimpses of the knowledge that may enable us to 'help ourselves in time of need.

Every man or woman who has worked in a garden or possessed as much as a single rose knows what green ft> mav do to spoil the promise of the healthiest tree but how many have looked on the underpart of the leaves or on the bark- lor the little yellow eggs that tell ol deliverers at hand, or have watched the dark, flat, six-legged larva new rom the egg moving destructive as ;, mi e amon S the unsuspecting flies s I here are many other insects that Help us to grow fruit and vegetables and flowers, but the ni*st conspicuous and easily-recognised of all its the ladybird.