I get a lot of lady bugs on my porch in the fall and I read somewhere that they will eat raisins - I put some out for them last year and it attracted about 50 of them in a few hours. I believe they use the sugar for energy when the aphids die off after the first frost. I put a pile in front of my "lady bug house" to attract them and give them a little something extra to get through the winter. Don't know if it works or not but they like them.

That's good to know, thanks.

They're the ones that eat fruit in the fall - yet another pesky habit that no one who introduced them to the U.S. worried about at the time. Then again, if they're eating raisins in a ladybug house, they're not eating ripe fruit on trees or invading a person's house.

So they're German girls! Thanks. I was under the impression that all femals were queens and all workers were males. There was a male in the group at one point but he has been long gone. Does that mean there's a queen in the box if there are workers? Don't want to go in just yet - I'm not that brave.

the nest fell apart and they are just hanging on but will not make it thru the winter. i think the old queen dies, and the nest breaks up and then the last emerged workers just wander around with nothing much to do. of course i could be wrong and often am. but what id reallyyyyy like to see is the ladybugs eating raisins.

You guys are so funny! I don't know where I could upload them here so I just uploaded a few pics from last year to my Flickr page. Go to this link to see the ladybugs eating raisins.

Jen

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goyanks34/sets/72157622557576354/

Multicolored Asian Lady Beetles. They'll eat fruit in the fall, too, on or off the tree. And they'll come inside people's houses for warmth, so it's just as well you're giving them ladybug houses to find first!

To post an image to the Guide when you already know what the critter is, use the clickable guide or the search form to find the species (or genus or whatever), click the "images" tab, and then click "add images," the same as you'd do in ID Request. To get you started, here's the H. axyridis image page:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/397/bgimage

Just pick one or two photos and crop them to show just the insects if you can. If you don't have photo editing software, upload them anyway and I'll crop them for you.

I'll post one or two after I crop them. I call all of them ladybugs. Aren't the native ladybug species (9 spotted and convergent)very few and hard to find? I've never seen a 9 spotted and have only seen a few convergents. That does explain when I put a convergent on a raisin by the bug house last year (it was fall and it accidently came in on my jacket) he/she wanted nothing to do with it! Kept walking away. I didn't realize they were so different after all. Quite interesting.

Dozens of species of lady beetles have been imported for biocontrol, but that's a small fraction of the 481 species in North America. A lot of them are small and brown and hard to recognize as lady beetles. Oh, but some of them are yellow, orange, purple, gray, blue...really, two species are blue with orange spots, which is quite a brain-twister the first time you see one!

If you're interested, check out the Coccinellidae Info page, there's a list of genera with representative photos of every one we have in BugGuide. I love the ladies!

"Ladybugs" is fine as a common name, and I grew up with it too. So is "ladybird," for that matter - the most common name in Canada and Britain. I still say "ladybug" in casual conversation but have trained myself to write "lady beetle" when I'm being entomological :-)