http://www.extension.umn.edu/yardandgarden/YGLNews/YGLN-Apr0104.html#malb

How do you get rid of lady beetles from your home?

Once they get into your home, your options are very limited. Insecticides have very little impact on overall lady beetle numbers. They won’t affect lady beetles that have not emerged from wall voids or attics yet. Your only practical recourse is to vacuum them as often as you see them.

An economical method to vacuum lady beetles is to use a knee high nylon stocking that has been inserted into the extension hose and secured with a rubber band (see fig). As you vacuum, the lady beetles are captured in the stocking. As soon as the vacuum is turned off, remove the stocking so the captured beetles can’t escape. As you remove it, the rubber band closes around the stocking, effectively “bagging” the lady beetles. You can then throw away the stocking or discard the contents of the stocking and reuse it.

What is the best control of lady beetles?

The best control is prevention. All of the lady beetles seen during the winter and spring enter buildings last fall. Keeping lady beetles out is a two pronged approach. First seal as many opening as possible that may allow lady beetles into a home. Concentrate along doors, windows, fascia boards, where utility lines enter buildings and similar places. Seal any openings 1/8 inch or larger. This should be done by the end of September before lady beetles start to enter homes. Physical exclusion should be supplemented with a residual insecticide application applied before insects begin to enter buildings, usually late September or early October. Apply the insecticide to doors, windows, and roof lines, paying particular attention to the south and west sides where the insects are most common. Common examples of effective insecticides available to the public include those containing:

* bifenthrin
* cyfluthrin
* cypermethrin
* deltamethrin
* permethrin.

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 12pm

I’ve read just about everything that every extension agency has to say about this. The general rule is “once they’re in the house, there’s nothing to do.” The SE exterior wall has been sprayed down with insecticide every 10 days for the past month, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing them down any.

I think I need to go to down and get a detergent adaptor for the house. The soap may well do the little buggers in.

Looks like I’m on sentry duty during daylight hours, as long as it stays sunny and warm. That’ll be at least through tomorrow. Bummer.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 1pm

No one has more of these critters invading than we do - there was an enormous swarm in our orchard yesterday and today they are all over the house. We vacuum them as much as we can to keep them at bay. Before you go crazy with the chemicals, I ask that you consider the damage to your health, Amber’s health, the health of any pets that you have, as well as the damage to the environment that you will cause by spraying pesticides. Is anything that the beetles do worth risking the health of you and your loved ones? In my opinion, absolutely not. Break out the vacuum, Waldo, and save your health and that of the rest of us!

Posted by Malena on 31 October 2005 @ 1pm

I just tried that approach, and I think it’s probably a lot more dangerous. As I dangled the upper half of my body over the ridge pole at the end of the house, smacking at the beetles 20′ up on the SE wall, I realized that whatever danger brought about by using permethrins is probably less than the danger I was in just then. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 1pm

The SE exterior wall has been sprayed down with insecticide every 10 days for the past month, but it doesn’t seem to be slowing them down any.

Another result of the tragic banning of DDT. Before that misguided EPA decision, you could’ve wiped those suckers out pretty quickly and safely.

Posted by I.Publius on 31 October 2005 @ 3pm

Far more misguided was the USDA’s decision to import huge quantities of these beasts in the late 70s and the late 80s, spreading them across Louisiana and Mississippi in hopes they’d reproduce.

And reproduce they did.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 4pm

At the end of the day, they are too numerous against which to prevail without killing yourselves (one way or the other) in the process. So why not accept the inevitable, vacuum the ones that make it inside the house, and let be?

I. Publius, what are you thinking? The really misguided decision was when the Feds outlawed the use of lead and arsenic insecticides. So what if a few orchards have heavy metal levels that measure off the charts?

Posted by Malena on 31 October 2005 @ 5pm

So why not accept the inevitable, vacuum the ones that make it inside the house, and let be?

Because it’s not inevitable. :) The day’s battle let rather few into the frame of the house (I suspect), and if I can just stick it out through tomorrow, that may be the end of the onslaught.

Last year, we had tens of thousands of lady beetles in the house. It’s a disgusting way to spend a winter. For starters, they bite. And when disturbed in any way, they engage in reflex bleeding, releasing their foul-smelling blood from the base of their legs. They end up in everything, crawling through our food, swimming in our water, drowning in the shower and hibernating in our drawers. On warm days, they awaken and swarm, hundreds emerging from the walls and flying through the house. I can vacuum up a hundred of them, leave for ten minutes, and find another hundred in their place. There were days in which I’d spend hours just vacuuming lady beetles. I can’t help but wonder if they’re disease-bearing (though the creatures themselves are sufficiently numerous and unpleasant to warrant extermination).

Not this year. We’re going to hang dark-colored tarps over the side of the house in the morning (they’re primarily attracted to light-colored surfaces), and spray down those that congregate on the tarp with a hose-mounted sprayer containing a mixture of detergent and pesticides.

Now, if only I could figure out how to keep the wasps out of the house…

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 5pm

“and hibernating in our drawers”

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 5pm

(snort) (chortle)

Posted by Janis Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 5pm

“Because it’s not inevitable. :) The day’s battle let rather few into the frame of the house (I suspect), and if I can just stick it out through tomorrow, that may be the end of the onslaught.”

Waldo, you are dreaming in a big way if you think that you only got a few - those are just the ones that you saw. There is NO stopping them from getting into every nook and cranny of your house. And you think they will be done swarming in a day or two? Not likely. Your only defense is to vacuum the ones that get inside (BTW, it’s easiest to do this at night when they congregate in concentrated bunches in corners and near lights). I prefer to pick my battles, and most of them have to do with the kids. But by all means, continue on - I will be fascinated to follow along. After all, there is always the outside, very unlikely chance that I could be wrong… :-)

Posted by Malena on 31 October 2005 @ 8pm

The swarming, happily, only goes as long as the sun shines directly on the wall. As the sun moved over our house, and the shadow moved up the wall, the beetles moved farther up until, by ~3pm, there were none, because the wall was in the shade. As soon as the temperature drops or the clouds come along the swarming will end. So a lovely week could be a real bummer for me. :)

The trouble we have here is that they take up residence in the walls. They live in there until they decide that it’s warm enough that they should leave. Unfortunately, they don’t do this all at once but, rather, over the course of the whole of winter. So to vacuum them means to do so several times a day for months — we can’t do it all at once.

I should mention that we went through this last year, so I’m no stranger to the process. :) Last year we had significantly greater numbers swarming — I’m hoping that between the insecticide and the hosing, I reduced the number of them that released the volume of the chemical scent that they release that says “hey, other beetles — come here, it’s a good place to spend the winter.” Because we hadn’t learned better, we spent a whole day vacuuming hundreds of them as they came in the house, not realizing that far more were bedding down in the walls. Now we know that we’ve got to cut ‘em off at the outside wall, before they get in.

We’ve got a couple of 20′x10′ tarps. I’ll tack those up to the roofline in the morning. I’m hoping that their bright-blue color will be sufficient to repel them, since it’s grays and whites that attract them. We’ll see. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 31 October 2005 @ 9pm

I went up on the AT yesterday, and at the Glass Hollow Overlook they were everywhere. I could see swarms of them all up and down the cliff face (not to mention my face). I thought it was a localized occurence, but I guess not…

Posted by Chad R. on 1 November 2005 @ 10am

Now is the time to get out the caulking gun & seal, seal, seal. You probably already know this, though. They aren’t coming in from the outside, in most cases,
they are coming in from the walls where they’ve lived since last winter. You need to caulk inside the house now, to stop them from heading the
wrong direction - into the house. Then seal the outside of the house. Seal baseboards, window frames, corners - literally everything.

Good luck. They’re a bitch. Especially since they have few natural enemies.

Posted by Olivia on 1 November 2005 @ 11am

Happily, ours already escaped. In a single day, in early spring, they fled outward. We haven’t seen a single one in months. Amber and I have spent a good bit of time trying to seal the house, but we came to the conclusion a few weeks ago that it’s simply not possible to seal the house sufficiently to prevent critters this small from getting in. (Let me say that it’s not a particularly well-built house, and I’ll leave it at that. :)

Great Stuff is, indeed, great stuff. I was up on the ladder yesterday afternoon, desperately spraying it into gaps before I realized that there’s not enough Great Stuff in all of Lowe’s to seal our house. Hence the tarp. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 November 2005 @ 11am

Have you tried camphor oil or menthol? I recall reading a few years ago that there was a study that showed this to be a repellent and kept the beetles from
over-wintering in places with strong camphor smells.

Have you tried a black light trap?

Build it yourself:
http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Other/goodpest/harmoniatrap.pdf

Buy it:
http://www.biconet.com/traps/asianTrap.html

I wonder if you could just set up a black light directly behind some fly strips and catch them that way?

I guess you’ll be facing this problem in the spring too when those that made it into the walls come out again. If your walls (from the outside) are very
“porous”, is there any way that you could physically freeze and kill the ones in your walls this winter by using a CO2 canister with tubing on the nozzle?

Good luck in any case!

Posted by Olivia on 1 November 2005 @ 3pm

Those are lots of great ideas, Olivia — thank you!

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 November 2005 @ 4pm