Roundtable: Housewife’s Secret Arsenal
Ladybugs: The (Natural) Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend? Enlisting Ladybugs into the War on Insect Pests
Rochester Institute of Technology
kxwsbi@rit.edu
Abstract
Gardeners around the United States often call in reinforcements for pest control—ladybugs.
Ladybug sellers claim that in contrast to chemical pesticides, ladybugs are natural, but the reality is more
complicated. Conscripting ladybugs into the war on insect pests at home in the garden is a continuation, not a
departure, from the long history of militarized pest control in the US. This trajectory was not inevitable. The
divergent discussions and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug reveal a tension.
Similar to the other lifeforms that traveled from Asia to the US, the harlequin ladybug is not merely
unacknowledged as an effective garden predator but is instead blamed for a wide range of ills. And the longer
the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern war. Militarized
pest control practices and imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden, but there
are other possibilities beyond seeing ladybugs as good and bad, natural enemy or just enemy.
This essay
is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife's Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight
object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of
this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be
invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of
homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about
the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden.
Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking
how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.
Keywords
ladybug, insect, pesticide, garden, home, war, biological control, pest
Every year gardeners around the United States, overwhelmed with aphids or other small insects eating
the plants in their garden, call in reinforcements—ladybugs. Ladybugs (or ladybird beetles, as they are
known in some other parts of the world) are a group of beetles. There are thousands of kinds globally, of which
hundreds can be found in North America. While they can be many different shapes, colors, and sizes, most are
small with red elytra (the distinctive shiny hard coverings over their wings) with small black spots as adults.
The ladybugs that these home gardeners buy and release are one particular kind—the convergent ladybug
(Hippodamia convergens)—so named for the two white marks on their black pronotum (segment below the
head) that angle towards each other (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug are two sides of one coin. They share
many behavioral and life history traits—yet one is deemed a weapon in the war on insects and the other a
target.
A) Hippodamia convergens (the convergent ladybug). Source: “Convergent lady beetle,” by Flickr
user Gary Chang, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/gcchang/15452820882
B)
Aggregation of
dozens of H. convergens on a grey and white rock. Source: “Ladybugs swarming,” by Flickr user Dru!,
CC BY-NC 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/druclimb/5907250838/
C)
Aggregation of dozens of
H. axyridis on a fence. Source: “Ladybug cluster,” by Flickr user The Real Estreya, CC BY-NC-SA
2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/gcchang/15452820882/
D) Harmonia axyridis (the
harlequin ladybug). Source: “Harlequin Ladybird - Harmonia axyridis,” by Flickr user John Quine, CC
BY-NC-SA 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/john5554/48134958977/
Procuring ladybugs for
release is relatively simple and cheap. There are many vendors who sell them online, and with
the click of a button, a bag of adult convergent ladybugs can arrive at one's home. Ten dollars
could buy a few hundred; and one hundred dollars could buy ten thousand. Buyers are instructed
to simply sprinkle them on their infested plants. Then, the ladybugs get to work—eating
other insects considered pests, ones that eat plants and gardeners want gone. Framed as the
natural alternative to chemical pesticides, releasing convergent ladybugs is instead a
continuation of the same militarized rhetoric and techniques historically used in the US to
combat suspected invaders or exercise control over the naturescape (Duong 2023).
Chemical insecticides for home garden use largely emerged out of military chemical warfare
products developed for the First and Second World Wars (Russell 2001). US federal entomologists
were instrumental in developing and advocating domestic uses of formerly wartime chemicals, such
as organophosphates (Russell 2001, 76). Other common household and garden herbicides, chemicals
to control undesirable plants, also emerged from military research and use in conflicts,
including chemicals such Agent Orange, a herbicide enlisted by the US military into the chemical
warfare arsenal deployed during the Vietnam War (Zierler 2011, 67). Yet as these chemicals
became more widely used in domestic spaces during peacetime, there was extensive backlash as
impacts of broad-spectrum and long-lasting pesticides were revealed (Carson 1962) and as some
scientists pushed for a ban on “ecocide” through herbicides (Zierler 2011, 14). The trade-offs
of using them were deemed insufficient outside of wartime use on enemies that had been
dehumanized in part through comparisons to insect pests (Russell 2001, 27, 110, 161,
212-13).
This legacy lives on. Since World War II and the Cold War, the US entered a
long period of militarization that reshaped American life, infusing martial imagery and
metaphors into everyday culture (Bryan 2013, 4). Arguably, the US became even more punitive in
the intervening years, with the growth of the prison-industrial complex and the emergence of
victims' rights in politics and television (Sherry 2005). Additionally, the US launched many
other domestic rhetorical and material “wars,” including the war on drugs (Peniche 2015) and the
wars on fat and obesity (McMichael 2010). Representations of insects in postwar American
literature and film also shifted. Literature and women's studies scholar Catherine Cassel's work
has found that insects in these films were often portrayed as hyper-reproductive, using both
gender and race stereotypes to portray these insects as foreign invaders taking over the world,
while also portraying their victims as vulnerable, unsuspecting, white American housewives
(2016, 50-64). Cassel also argues that these films fit into a longer history of US films
portraying insects and invaders more generally as threats that must be destroyed to save both
the nuclear family's home and, by proxy, the homeland (9-17, 50-64).
Convergent ladybugs
are caught in the crossfire, labeled as both belonging to the homeland ideal and called in as
mercenary soldiers to defend it. For most home gardeners, convergent ladybugs need to be hired;
they do not already live there. They are harvested from the “wild,” a process made possible by
their life history; they assemble in large groups, often in the Sierra Nevada mountains in
California. Sellers explicitly acknowledge this ladybug practice of coming together—and
that harvesting, versus the cost of cultivating—is the only way they would be in the
business (Green Thumb Nursery 2021; Natures Good Guys 2021). Once collected, the ladybugs are
kept in a refrigerator in a sort of stasis—not fed nor actively cared for, warehoused and
waiting to be called up to duty. Sellers refer to these ladybugs as “natural” and “nature's good
guys” —while also calling them the “best general soldiers” (Green Thumb Nursery 2021;
Natures Good Guys 2021).
While sellers claim that, in contrast to ladybugs, pesticides
disrupt the “delicate balance of nature” (Nature's Way Ladybugs, n.d.), the reality is more
complicated. Gardeners releasing ladybugs in the US are relying on the capture and imprisonment
of wild animals that are moved thousands of miles, conscripted to fight aphids and other
creatures that enjoy eating plants. Claims of “natural” to buyers mask the sellers; process,
which holds these ladybugs in a liminal fugue state in refrigerators, while they await transport
to the battleground. There are many potential harms to releasing ladybugs similar to those of
using chemical pesticides. These risks include causing declines in populations that are
harvested for home garden releases, bringing diseases and other pests to other ladybugs in the
transplanted location, and competition with local ladybugs and other insects for food (Jepsen
and Black 2014). Once removed from their collection area, those ladybugs will never
return—and it is estimated that millions are collected to be sold for ladybug releases
every year (Jepsen and Black 2014). This displacement can potentially result in insufficient
ladybugs to control the insect pests in central California. In turn, the release of ladybugs in
home gardens could be accelerating the chemical treadmill, resulting in added pesticide use in
the region from where they were removed. While its aggregating winter behavior makes it easy and
profitable for sellers—and its voracious feeding makes it desirable for
gardeners—the convergent ladybug is just another weapon in the long war on insect pests in
the American home and garden.
Yet this trajectory was not inevitable. These same
celebrated traits are deemed repulsive and scary in other ladybugs. Nowhere is this tension more
clear than divergent discussion and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin
ladybug (Harmonia axyridis) (Figure 1). While both ladybugs are effective predators for
garden pests and both have winter aggregations, only the convergent ladybug is celebrated for
these traits. Also known as the “Asian lady beetle,” the harlequin ladybug is part of what
gender and ethnic studies scholars Karen Cardozo and Banu Subramaniam refer to as the
“assembling of a multispecies Asian/America” (2013, 4). Like the other organisms they discuss,
it is an example of “invited invasions” (Cardozo and Subramaniam 2013). The harlequin ladybug
was originally released in the US in the early twentieth century as a biological control agent
of pest insects of food crops. While the earlier twentieth-century planned invasions were deemed
necessary and good, later unintentional introduction and spread has been labeled an invasion.
This is not surprising. The earlier introduction aligns with the immigrant gifts movement in the
US, public efforts and exhibitions in the early twentieth century that showcased arts and crafts
by foreign-born residents, ostensibly celebrating their aesthetic contributions while still
maintaining a deficit view of immigrants and their cultures. Even Allen Eaton, a curator and
author writing a contemporaneous book on immigrant art, in trying to distinguish himself from
those who “fear that the pure American stock was in danger of contamination from European
immigrants” (Eaton 1932, 14), said of the artists, “he has something to give, be it ever so
little” as gift to American culture (27). This framing viewed and valued immigrants as cultural
resources for extraction, especially for culinary and domestic knowledge, as evidence of the
cosmopolitan taste of American housewives (Hoganson 2015, 88). Simultaneously, consumerist
writing at the time claimed US exceptionalism (superiority) in food abundance and domestic
sanitation (Hoganson 2015, 94).
Eaton and others' mention and celebration of
specifically European immigrants is intentional. The introduction of the harlequin ladybug in US
history was during a period in which Asian immigrants (and insects) were subjected to widespread
xenophobia. As historian and international studies expert Jeannie Shinozuka's (2013) scholarship
on Japanese beetles and Japanese immigrants has shown, US scientists and officials raised fears
of foreign people and foreign insects destroying crops, specifically to protect land ownership
and dominion they imagined as rightfully belonging to white residents. And as Cassel's work
emphasizes, narratives about insect invasions were explicitly gendered xenophobia. The insect
invaders, not just the housewife victims, were also coded female, either taking over through
population growth (e.g., ant queens and colonies) that “represent uncontained feminine excess”
(Cassel 2016, 46) or as monstrous threats to masculinity (e.g., praying mantids that eat their
male partners after copulation) (50). These images echo the racialized sexualization of Asian
women past and present as “villainous temptresses: in both US law and media since at least the
nineteenth century (Hwang and Parreñas 2021).
Similar to the other lifeforms that
traveled from Asia to the US, the harlequin ladybug is not merely unacknowledged as an effective
garden ally; it is blamed for a wide range of ills. While the convergent ladybug is prized for
winter aggregations, making them easier to collect, the harlequin ladybug is often referred to
as a ”nuisance household invader“ (Roy et al., 2016, 1015), due to their overwintering groups,
which can sometimes be inside houses. And while the convergent ladybug is intentionally bought
and moved around the country for its voracious feeding, the harlequin ladybug's appetites are
potentially so effective that they are widely claimed to be the cause for displacement of and
decline in native ladybugs in several countries (Roy and Brown 2015; Harmon, Stephens, and Losey
2007), without acknowledging that all types of ladybugs are thought to be in decline (Harmon,
Stephens, and Losey 2007). No matter—these traits have led the harlequin ladybug to be
widely perceived as a foreign invader to exterminate, yet another pest in the eternal war on
insects, rather than an ally in the garden. In fact, some recent scientific guidance to
homeowners has tried to claim that harlequin ladybugs aren't ladybugs at all (Mississippi State
University Extension 2017). This nativism parallels the experiences of Asian immigrants in the
US Progressive era, when exaggerated ”evidence“ from physicians grounded in eugenics and
prejudices often labeled immigrants as diseased and harmful to public health (Markel and Stern
1999).
Figure 2. A conception of ladybugs is that they are round, red, and have symmetrical round black
spots on their wings. This figure shows harlequin ladybugs do look very similar to this iconic image, but
convergent ladybugs do not (they are oval and have a distinctive patterned “neck” area that is not visible on
any of these). All images publicly licensed.
Sources:
A) ”14102009-Softboxinfantil-9,“ by Flickr user Raúl Hernández González, CC BY 2.0 www.flickr.com/photos/rahego/4011937297/
B) ”Children's Ladybugs,“ by Flickr user fs999, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/fs999/8558046744/
C) ”(?),“ by Flickr user Jason Taellious, CC BY-SA 2.0,
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dreamsjung/3662195160/
D) ”IMG_0055.jpg,“ by Flickr user TosYum, CC BY-NC 2.0, www.flickr.com/photos/tosyum/494498149/
E) ”Ladybird nail art,“ by Flickr user Neil Milne, CC BY-SA 2.0,
www.flickr.com/photos/borispumps/5958248489/
And yet the longer the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern
war itself. It is striking that the default aesthetic of ladybugs in popular culture strongly resembles the
harlequin ladybug more so than the
convergent ladybug. Its image is ubiquitous—red, round, and with black round spots (Figure 2). This is
the quintessential ladybug—and a fiction. It is an amalgamation of ladybugs that are native and good,
that deserve to exist, an imagined nature (Van Dooren 2011). The harlequin ladybug troubled this
imagination, as it matches the archetype but is nevertheless undesirable. It is likely that many gardeners
cannot tell the difference between the two, let alone the other hundreds of kinds they may find. In this
sense, ladybugs are ”estranged companions“ (Hollin and Giraud 2021), with US cultural and chemical pest
control trajectories leaving the legacy that gardeners are unable to know there are many different types of
ladybugs in the garden, to know they don't need to buy them from across the country, or to know that most
ladybugs exhibit the behaviors that get the harlequin ladybug labeled a nuisance (biting, smelling, etc.).
Gardeners became estranged in part due to the history of using broad-spectrum chemical controls. The recent
return to more ”natural“ pest controls, as well as shifts in which ladybugs are common, means that some
ladybug bodies may seem new and unfamiliar, or at least more unfamiliar than others. Yet many ladybugs in
practice serve the same function for gardeners. As science studies and posthumanist scholars Joanna Latimer
and Lynda Birke (2009) write in their work about people's relations with horses, ”natural technologies“ are
a paradox, requiring the construction and maintenance of rules about which kinds of technology and tools are
considered natural (or not) and why.
The classification and understanding of ladybugs are
complicated by the changing, slipping categories scientists are giving them. For example, some entomologists
have begun using the term ”adventive,“ meaning ”having arrived from somewhere else and established feral
populations“ (Frank and Mizell 2008, 2121), to refer to the harlequin ladybug (Harmon, Stephens, and Losey
2007) and other ladybugs. In using ”adventive,“ entomologists acknowledge ladybugs' foreignness; however,
unlike the label ”invasive“ applied to organisms deemed harmful, ”adventive“ allows scientists to
intentionally carve out space to value pest control by ladybugs to gardens and farms. There is also a call
to reframe biological control as using ”natural enemies“ for ”planned invasions“ and that supposed
”aggressiveness“ and ”cannibalism“ behaviors are now deemed desirable (Abram and Moffat 2018), independent
of questions of where the insects originated. Another example is referring to non-native ladybugs as
”additional species" (Cranshaw 2014) in cooperative extension documents written for public homeowner
audiences. Examining ladybug lives here is not to accept scientific categories or to privilege scientific
ways of knowing (as Angela Willey [2016] cautions against), but to examine how science upholds particular
forms of social order. It's more convenient to make new labels for ladybugs than to acknowledge the unequal
benefits and legacies of pest control and homeownership as projects of white supremacy in the US.
Who is to say which ladybugs belong and where? As Cardozo and Subramaniam write regarding other invited
invasions and assemblages, US institutions have vilified particular species rather than structural
conditions that introduce them and shape communities (2013, 8-15). Militarized pest control practices and
imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden. Yet there are other possibilities
beyond seeing ladybugs as good and bad, natural enemy or just enemy. In the meantime, ladybugs remain
enlisted in the home garden war on pests, shaped by rhetorics of militarization and control.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the special issue editors, Diana Pardo Pedraza, Xan Chacko, Astrida Neimanis,
and Jennifer Terry, for leading such a supportive writing process. Thank you to my fellow workshop
participants, including Heather Davis, Salvador Zárate, and Niharika Pandit, as well as anonymous
journal reviewers, for feedback on previous versions that improved this work.
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Author Bio
Kaitlin Stack Whitney is an Assistant Professor in the Science, Technology & Society department at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. She previously worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency Office of Pesticide Programs in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, before receiving her PhD in zoology with a minor in science and technology studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.