Ladybugs: The (Natural) Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend? Enlisting Ladybugs into the War on Insect Pests

Abstract

Gardeners around the United States often call in reinforcements for pest control—ladybugs. Ladybug sellers claim that in contrast to chemical pesticides, ladybugs are natural, but the reality is more complicated. Conscripting ladybugs into the war on insect pests at home in the garden is a continuation, not a departure, from the long history of militarized pest control in the US. This trajectory was not inevitable. The divergent discussions and management of the convergent ladybug and the harlequin ladybug reveal a tension. Similar to the other lifeforms that traveled from Asia to the US, the harlequin ladybug is not merely unacknowledged as an effective garden predator but is instead blamed for a wide range of ills. And the longer the harlequin ladybug is around, the less clear it is who the enemy really was, as in modern war. Militarized pest control practices and imaginations have framed insects as both enemy and soldier in the garden, but there are other possibilities beyond seeing ladybugs as good and bad, natural enemy or just enemy. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.