Don't Kill It 'Til You Know It!

This entire growing season, I've been having problems with thrips on my flowers. From my Meyer lemon blooms, to the "weeds" suffocating my lawn (hmm, I should pull those)... I don't know if they've done any significant damage, but I left them alone because I would have done damage by either removing the flowers or spraying the flowers with a chemical or water, thus reducing pollination and bee visits, or worse, killing the beneficial insects.

Then I noticed these very pretty, tiny bugs all over my plants and flowers...

Now, I'm not one to go squishing and squashing every bug I see. I know there are good guys and bad guys working hard out there, but I didn't have time to sit down and go through my awesome bug book, which is only quickly helpful if you have an idea of what the bug eats, or what kind of bug family it may be a part of. My initial thought was that they were an adult form of thrips, so I went with that and started smooshing them.

Then the other day I was looking through the February/March issue of Organic Gardening during a moment of... peace... (ie I was in the bathroom, because that's about the only time us mom's get "moments of peace," and so that's where I keep my magazines, lol), and it hit me! It was the briefest of mentions in the "Good Bug, Bad Bug" section of the mag... The minute pirate bug is a predatory bug. I ran to my awesome bug book (see that link above--seriously), and there it was!

Arrrg! I'd been killing a predatory bug. One that eats those annoying thrips! And wouldn't you know it? I checked my charentais blossoms this morning, and no thrips! Lots of pirates hanging about, but no thrips!

So please, gardeners, before you kill it, identify it! Learning to heed my own advice, here is a post from last year on bug identification.

One more site I've found that can be used through means of the plant that is affected, University of CA IPM Program.

Anyone know what this strange looking bug might be, LOL?