Ladybugs brought in to fight pests in the gardens of Parliament House

Four species of ladybugs are shipped to Parliament House in Canberra for the summer holidays to help control plant pests.

Transcript

00:00Off you go.

00:03Don't be fooled by fairy tales and folklore.

00:06These ladybugs are voracious predators, bred to kill.

00:10They pretty much suck the insides out of it.

00:13So you'll come back and you'll see a whole lot of just white shells

00:17because they remove the insides of the aphids.

00:20As part of the pest management strategy at Parliament House,

00:23four species of ladybug are brought into the gardens

00:26to feast on plant pests.

00:28They will immediately begin spreading out,

00:31hunting down aphids and breeding.

00:35Of the 6,000 species of ladybug, 500 are native to Australia.

00:40Very diverse family.

00:42The smallest of them all are probably about 0.8 millimetres long

00:46and the biggest that we have here are probably close to 4 centimetres.

00:51And they are not all feeding on aphids.

00:54Adam Swipinski has devoted his life to the study of beetles.

00:58The ladybirds that we have in the gardens,

01:00when we say they are very good controlling aphids,

01:05they are very few of them.

01:07In Australia there is only 15 species of them.

01:09Not all are useful and some are serious pests themselves.

01:13They're really bad ones that we have very few in Australia.

01:17You can have them on your cucumbers and zucchini leaves

01:20and they basically shred the leaves.

01:23Managing pests with beneficial bugs reduces pesticide use

01:26and helps balance the ecosystem, regardless of party politics.

01:30Even though over summer there's not many people around the building,

01:33the bugs are still hard at work.

01:35The ultimate FIFO workers, beetling away to keep pests at bay.