Ladybug Food

Will putting out small amounts of ladybug food cause too many ladybugs?

Like, lets say you didn't have any pests, and never did, but you wanted a few ladybugs roaming around on the off-chance they find a spider mite and eat it. Could you just stick out some lady bug food to keep them alive? Or would you just wake up to 10,000 ladybugs?

I am wondering about this myself. If given no food source, will the ladybugs damage the plants? If not I don't see why you can't have a bunch.

You need to look up the reproduction rate of a lady bug and you could probably answer that yourself. Why keep them "alive" if there's no pests? Let some go in the garden, if they are dead quick then there were no mites to eat. If they are around, they must be eating something!

Dubdeuce said:

You need to look up the reproduction rate of a lady bug and you could probably answer that yourself. Why keep them "alive" if there's no pests? Let some go in the garden, if they are dead quick then there were no mites to eat. If they are around, they must be eating something!

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Although what you say makes perfect sense, it doesn't answer the question I asked, will the ladybug hurt/eat the plant if no other food source is present?

And the op wants to do it as a preventative measure, which is always good. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

JoshTheMadTitan said:

Although what you say makes perfect sense, it doesn't answer the question I asked, will the ladybug hurt/eat the plant if no other food source is present?

And the op wants to do it as a preventative measure, which is always good. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

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I wasn't actually answering you when I posted that. No, ladybugs will not eat plants. There are certain variety of plant-eating ladybug called the 28-spot ladybug. Don't buy those and you're fine. Also, that's exactly why I asked why you would want to feed the lady bugs. If you feed them, they won't even be looking for mites to eat more or less negating the idea of even having them in there. If they aren't around in a few days, that means there are no mites. Throw out a few more and repeat the process throughout your grow.