Beneficial Garden Insects

Predators hunt, attack, and kill their prey. Encourage these natural enemies by avoiding pesticides that kill them; choosing plants that provide them pollen, nectar, and shelter; and keeping ants out of pest infested plants. common predators that eat garden pests are pictured below.


  • Nabids or the damsel bugs: They are considered helpful species in agriculture because of their predation on many types of crop pests, such as cabbage worms, aphids, and lygus bugs.
  • Green lacewings: They feed on pollen, nectar and honeydew supplemented with mites, aphids and other small arthropods.
  • Lady Beetle or Coccinellidae: They feed on aphids or scale insects, which are pests in gardens, agricultural fields, orchards, and similar places.
  • Mealybug Destroyer: Feeds on Mealy-bugs (Pseudococcus sp.) and other scale insects.
  • Minute Pirate - Bug Orius spp
  • Minute pirate bug or Anthocoridae: Pirate bugs feed on other small insects, spider mites and insect eggs. They cut a hole into their prey, pump saliva into it and drink the contents. This makes them beneficial as biological control agents.
  • Praying Mantis: They will feed on any species small enough for them to capture, but large enough to engage their attention.
  • Predatory Mite or Phytoseiulus: A predatory mite is the most frequently used mite predator to control two-spotted spider mites in greenhouses and outdoor crops grown in mild environments.
  • Trichogramma: have the ability to parasitize numerous host species. Their main hosts are eggs of Lepidoptera and other species such as Hymenoptera, Neuroptera ... A single female can parasitize one to ten eggs a day.
  • Encarsia Formosa: Encarsia has been used as a natural pesticide to control whitefly populations in greenhouses since the 1920s.

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