Jul 21st, 2008
Dragonfly-by
Out in the garden yesterday evening, innocently checking on the ripening progress of my tomatoes, I got buzzed by a dragonfly. I barely had time to duck, much less see what was coming at me, but on its return path back to the huge bushes of asparagus, I saw that it was a dragonfly.
We seem to get dragonfies around this time each summer, and I wondered if they are good or bad bugs when it comes to the garden. Turns out, they’re good:
Dragonflies eat the larvae of other water-loving insects, including mosquito larvae. (I don’t know where they’re finding water in our neighborhood - we’re quite land locked, unless you count the neighbors’ pool) In fact, I learned that they can eat many times their weight in mosquitoes every day. Dragonflies also eat other kinds of flies and (eek) the occasional honeybee. Let’s just hope that there are enough mosquitoes to take care of that they can leave the poor honeybees alone.
