If you have never been swarmed with the Asian Lady Beetles then consider yourself lucky! Those little buggers may look like cute lady bugs but they are a menace! They are a orange/brown color not like the red lady bug. They also bite! Their sting is rather painful and similar to a sweat bee. Enough to be irritating for sure!
The other thing is, when they swarm there is the clean up! Thousands of those little dead bugs needing to be vacuumed up! One day I stopped counting at over 400 of those live pests being sucked up in the guest bedroom where they like to swarm every year! Gah! Try doing that every night for several months just so you can go to bed without getting stung on the lip! No fun! I swear they leave a scent trail for the next years batch of pests to follow that says “this hotel has vacancies and service is outstanding!” Lol They also seem to be attracted to anything white! White houses, cars, trailers, outbuilding etc so keep that in mind when painting… also when outside white shirts attract them (yep stung on the belly as one crawled up my shirt one year as I got swarmed by being in the back yard talking to the neighbor while wearing a white shirt!).
After several years of trying different methods I finally found one that works! Yay!!!!! This keeps them out of the house and out of the RV and Car and cargo trailer! YES!!! Finally!
It’s rather a simple fix. It requires some scrap pieces of cloth. Some yarn. Some whole cloves, some bay leaves.
Take a cut square’ish piece of scrap cloth (if you want to go fancy you can purchase cute little muslin bags at the craft store instead… but you will need a bunch of them!) and place about a 1/2 teaspoon of whole cloves and one full bay leaf (crumble it in your fingers) in the center of the cloth. Gather up the edges of the cloth so the spices are balled up in the center and tie a piece of yarn around the cloth to hold the spices in place. I leave the yarn with a long tail so I can use that tail to tie the spice sachet onto vents and window locks etc. I also toss a few into the storage compartments in the RV and hang some in the cargo trailer and in the car… where ever the bugs usually show up that’s where you want these sachets! Make lots of them and be generous in their placement. In bedrooms or any normally high infestation places I take ornamental containers (shallow bowls and tea cups work) and place a good handful of the spices right into the container as well. If you have allergies… the nice thing is the scent from these spices are not very noticeable at all and they don’t bother me like insecticides and perfumy products usually do. You might get a very slight scent that smells like pie baking? But honestly you have to be right up on those spices to even smell that!
This works excellent! This is the first year we haven’t had an Asian lady bug infestation! Our neighbors…. not so lucky lol. Make lots of these sachets and toss/tie them everywhere! Cheap, easy, pesticide free, pet and kid friendly! If you try it, please let us know how it works for you… but for us, it has been a long sought after solution to a yucky problem that pesticides and nothing else seemed to solve!
Conestoga Chuck 