Have you ever grown broad beans and found the minute you turn
your back in Spring the flowers and plants are covered in blackfly? Just when
the runner beans are starting to shoot and twist their way to the sky, the same
little bugs take up residence.
Where do they come from and why is it my plants they attack?
Out comes the spray and washing up liquid and so starts a
battle of wits and survival between these little beasts and me that is repeated
all spring and summer.
Aphids can be every colour imaginable. We may be used to the
green and black varieties but there some 4,400 species in the world; yellow,
orange, red, blue, purple, brown varieties, all designed to suck the sap out of
whatever they fancy and eat at your or others’ plots.
Aphids have a soft
body, small eyes, large antennas, three pairs of legs and a mouth designed for
sucking. Most species are wingless and they eat both during the day and night.
‘Why are you spraying your beans? Shouldn’t you be watering
them so we can go home?’ my faithful allotment whippet Lottie asks from her
pillows on the bench.
‘Killing the blackfly.’ I respond.
‘But even I know the ladybirds and others do that for you.
Even the ants are often busy scurrying up and down your beans and coming down
dribbling their food and with fat bellies.’
‘The ants don’t eat the bugs, they eat their poo’ I reply
watching Lottie give an expression of disgust.
‘They eat their poo?’
I can see this is going to be a long discussion and one of
those where she either gets bored or I simply run out of answers to her endless
questions.
‘Ants extract sap out of the plant which is very high in
sugar. The bugs get little from the sugar so poo it out as droplets we call
honeydew and ants love sugar feed on that.’ I look at a smiling Lottie who can’t
wait to respond.
‘So, they are like vacuum cleaners or dustmen cleaning up
after the bugs?’
‘Yes, and the ants even protect the aphids from some predators
and some aphid-herding ants will adopt the aphids and take them back to their
nest during winter. They even carry them from plant to plant so they can ‘milk’
them and feed off their honeydew.’ I think that will give Lottie something to
think about and allow me to get back to my work.
A short while later Lottie pipes up, ‘You should find their
nests and spray their eggs.’
‘They don’t lay eggs as such. They reproduce without mating
and the females give birth to live young and at a phenomenal rate,’ I tell
Lottie who is now clearly interested to know more.
‘So how do they move so quickly from plant to plant?’
‘They can produce a generation of alates, or winged adults,
capable of flight and scouting out the next best plant on which to deposit the
females and they simply take up residence, start to feed and multiply.’
‘Then go after the flyers’ suggests Lottie.
‘I would if I could’ I reply, swatting a green flyer who was
foolish enough to land on my arm.
‘You never see Monty Don spraying his bugs’ Lottie offers
changing the subject.
‘Ah well that might not be good TV and very PC. He probably
has a small army of helpers off camera doing it for him. After all, no garden
is bug free’ I reply.
‘Robin doesn’t eat them?’
‘No.’
Then Lottie flops back down onto her pillow clearly bored
with aphids. ‘I bet they are not an endangered species and it certainly is a
Bug’s Life.’
