Beneficial insects that farmers should know

(Baonghean.vn) -In the agricultural ecosystem, besides insects that are harmful to crops, there are also beneficial species that farmers rarely know how to protect.

Currently, with the trend of intensive farming, increasing the number of crops and the indiscriminate use of pesticides, exceeding the dosage and concentration by farmers, beneficial insects have been reduced and the diversity in the agricultural ecosystem has decreased. To help farmers understand and be aware of protecting beneficial organisms, please share the following:

Natural enemyare beneficial natural organisms that eat or cause disease in pests that are harmful to agricultural production. Each agricultural ecosystem has different groups of natural enemies that play an important role in limiting the growth of pest populations.

Nowadays, using natural enemies is one of the biological measures widely applied in production practices. Below are some beneficial natural enemies that farmers can take advantage of to help their crops grow better.

Spider

Carnivorous spiders, dwarf spiders, jumping spiders, web spiders, lynx spiders… all eat insects. Living on land or in water, spiders are very good at hunting other insects and bugs. An adult spider can eat up to 15 prey a day.

Stink bugs

In this family of pests, there are still a few that are beneficial to crops, such as green stink bugs and water bugs. They often use their proboscis to suck eggs and destroy rice planthoppers.

Each green stink bug eats 7-10 eggs/day or 1-5 planthoppers/day, while water stink bugs can eat up to 10 planthoppers/day.

Ladybug

This is a diverse group of insects, useful in both the larval and adult stages. They are oval in shape and come in a variety of colours: red, yellow or with black dots on their backs.

Beneficial ladybugs include: Red ladybug (Micraspis sp.); Yellow ladybug (M. crocea); Six-spotted ladybug (Menochilus sexmaculatus); Eight-spotted ladybug (Hamonia octomaculata). Both adults and larvae of these ladybugs eat adult brown planthoppers, young planthoppers (hoppers) and planthopper eggs, each ladybug can eat 5-10 planthoppers per day.

Parasitic wasp

There are parasitic wasps such as small cocoon wasps, black wasps, red-eyed green wasps. They lay eggs in eggs or larvae. Then the wasp eggs will develop, destroying the parasite. A wasp can lay dozens of eggs a day.

There is also a parasitic wasp called the polyembryonic wasp that parasitizes leaf rollers. This wasp lays a single egg inside the leaf roller egg. But this initial wasp egg quickly divides into many eggs, which can hatch into more than 200 wasps.

Ants

Wherever there are living things on earth, there are ants. Most ants are carnivorous, and their favorite food is insects.

Dragonfly

There are many species of dragonflies. They can catch prey in the air, or swoop down like a helicopter. Dragonflies mostly eat insects and worms. It is difficult for anyone to escape the attack of the “dragonfly air force”.

Spoonbill

They look similar to grasshoppers and locusts but they do not eat plants... They are usually active at night and their favorite foods are stem borers, leafhoppers and stemhoppers.

Praying Mantis

This is one of the "premium" predators, perhaps they rarely return empty-handed when carrying sharp serrated "swords" to hunt for prey, the victims are insects that are harmful to rice as well as agricultural crops.

The tail of the pliers

The pintail beetle is shiny black, with a white space between the abdominal segments and a white spot at the tip of the antenna. They usually live in dry fields and nest underground at the base of rice plants. This beetle crawls into the grooves that stem borers have made to find larvae. Sometimes they climb onto leaves to find leaf rollers. They can eat 20 - 30 prey/day.

Three-chambered beetle

The Ophionea nigrofasciata beetle is an active hard-bodied insect. The larvae are shiny black, the adults are reddish brown. They often attack leaf rollers and other lepidopteran larvae. They often appear in both rice fields and crop fields.

Ants

The Paederus fucipes is reddish brown in color, with a large black stripe running across its back, forming a black stripe. They often take shelter in grass banks and rotten straw piles in the fields. They make nests underground and lay eggs. When brown planthoppers and leaf rollers appear in rice fields, they come and crawl into the nests and eat each one.

On average, each ant can eat 3-5 larvae per day. This species of ant also often appears in crop fields.

Tran Thi Hoai Phuong

(Nghe An Agricultural Extension Center)