One of the most important – and yet often overlooked – facets of gardening is its ability to increase backyard biodiversity. And not just within the plant kingdom. When a garden is composed of a wide range of plant material, the animal kingdom also benefits. Especially insects. Most gardeners know that having a diversity of good bugs in the garden means better pollination and fewer pests. While there are thousands of species of beneficial insects in North America, one of the best bugs for your garden is the ground beetle.
Ground beetles: Slug snackers extraordinaire!
Unless you garden at night, you aren’t likely to encounter this nocturnal beneficial insect on a regular basis, even though ground beetles are extremely common – there are over 2,000 species in North America alone. Each species looks different, of course, but most ground beetles are dark and shiny with ridged wing-covers. They hide in grasses or underneath objects during the day, so if you flip over a rock or a log and see a dark beetle scurrying around, there’s a very good chance it’s a ground beetle.
Ground beetles are such good bugs in the garden because they scour the garden for prey all night long. Both adult and larval ground beetles consume mites, snails, slugs, caterpillars, earwigs, cutworms, vine borers, aphids, and lots of other insects. Each beetle can eat more than its own body weight in prey insects every night (bye-bye slugs!). In my opinion, of all the good bugs in the garden, these seldom seen critters are the cream of the crop.
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Welcoming ground beetles
Many insects are specialized both in terms of their food needs and their habitat preferences. Smart gardeners use this to their advantage, installing certain plants in order to support a particular insect. You may already have milkweed to support larval monarchs, dill for the swallowtails, mountain mint for the native bees, or fennel for the ladybugs. These examples are just a small part of a very long list of plant/insect partnerships that can be easily fostered by making a few thoughtful choices. One such partnership exists for pest-munching ground beetles, too.
Because ground beetles like to take shelter in grasses during the day, building a specialized habitat known as a beetle bank is the best way to encourage this beneficial insect.
How beetle banks encourage more of these good bugs in the garden
A long-standing practice of farmers in Great Britain and Australia, beetle banking creates the perfect habitat for ground beetles. Beetle banks are elongated, permanent, raised berms, positioned throughout crop fields. They’re planted with the native bunchgrasses ground beetles love to take shelter in.
Ground beetles like to climb upwards and away from moisture, so the berms are mounded 12 to 18 inches high. The native bunchgrasses planted on the berm provide ideal daytime habitat, and when night falls, the beetles move out into the fields to forage for prey.
On farms, beetle banks are four- to eight-feet wide and run the entire length of a crop row, but for home gardeners, the scale is obviously much smaller.
Build a small-scale beetle bank using these steps:
- Select the location. If you don’t have room to put a beetle bank inside of your actual vegetable or flower garden, locate it a few feet away. Unlike some other good bugs in the garden, ground beetles will travel a good distance to find prey, but the closer it is to the garden, the better.
- Select the shape. You can go with a “classic” berm-shaped, two- to four-foot wide beetle bank, or if you don’t have that much room, another alternative is to create one or more beetle “bumps” instead of a bank. These are raised, circular areas in the lawn or garden that don’t have to be any particular size (though they should be at least four feet across); they just need to fit in with your landscape and remain undisturbed.
- Mound the soil. Whether you’re creating a bank or a bump, begin by mounding soil over the area until it’s 18 inches high (it will settle over time).
- Plant it. The entire area should be planted with a minimum of three different species of native bunchgrasses. There are many grass species that fit into this category, but all grow into a clump or tuft, rather than spreading horizontally to form a sod-like mat. Prairie dropseed, switch grasses, gamagrasses, feather grasses, muhly grasses, bluestems, and indian grasses are a good place to start.
- Maintain your beetle bank or bump. You’ll need to water the area until the grasses are established, and keep it weeded. But, other than that, there isn’t much maintenance required. Every year, after the grasses have gone to seed in the late fall, the area should be trimmed or mowed to a height of six to eight inches. Leave the clippings in place as they’ll create winter habitat for your ground beetles.
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Other beneficial insects live there, too
Research also shows that ground beetles aren’t the only beneficial insects that take shelter in these banks or bumps. Pest-eating rove beetles, tiger beetles, ladybugs, spiders, and lots of pollinators, such as native bees, are also regularly found in beetle banks.
As you can see, beetle banks are a great example of how backyard habitat creation can promote insect biodiversity and help gardeners get a grip on pests. Install a beetle bank or bump, and watch these good bugs in the garden do their thing!
What are some of the species of grasses?
Hi Sharon. That’s a great question. Different bunchgrasses are native to different parts of North America. One good source for information is Ernst Conservation Seeds (www.ernstseed.com). Some good, broad choices would be switchgrass, big bluestem, little bluestem, bottlebrush grass, blue grama, and deer grass, depending on where you live.
The photo on the top of the story and then the one talking about beetle jaws are actually photos of a long-horned woodborrer, Family Cerambycidae. :-). The other adult beetle shown is indeed a Carabidae, one of many species of ground beetles.
Greatly appreciate promoting bug friendly gardening!
Thanks for the heads-up Betsy. It’s tough to keep all those beetles straight!
I have a question about this beetle bank. If I build it will they come? Also my raised beds are made with centerblocks and are about 3 ft high. Will these beetles go from the grasses up the sides of the 3 garden beds and eat the bad bugs?
Hi Denise – Ground beetles are surprisingly agile climbers, so a three foot raised bed will be no problem for them. However, they likely won’t be as prevalent as they would be if your beds were ground level. And yes, if you build it they will come (but you have to go out at night with a flash light to look for them since most species are nocturnal).
Do North American farmers also make use of this beneficial practice ?
Some small farmers in the Pacific Northwest are adopting the practice. There is a group studying the benefits at OSU, so I expect more organic farmers will adopt this beneficial process over the coming years.
I live in Washington state and have a carnivorous garden. It is in a black plastic tub and surrounded by wildflowers and grasses. I have basically been farming ground beetles in this thing. They almost form a barrier on the wall of the garden as snails come to the garden and get picked off one by one. I have a couple small fruit slices in there to encourage insects in the day to get snatched up and at night I have a border control unlike any other!
That’s amazing, Brennan! Thanks for sharing.
Will beetles still hunt for food in a raised garden bed? There probably isn’t room to put the berm in the bed so I wonder if the wood border would be a barrier or if beetles would still crawl up and deal with gardening pests.
Great question! Yes, they will crawl up into the raised beds, but probably not up into a very tall one. This is just an educated guess on my part, though, since I couldn’t find any research data on the subject. I do know, though, that they can travel quite a long distance at night in search of prey, so I suspect they would have little trouble navigating a raised bed.
thanks for this article!
1-does the type of soil matter? we have mostly clay, but also add compost to some areas.
2- should this be mostly in the sun?
many thanks
pat
Full sun is best. There’s no need to amend clay soil as most of our native bunch grasses perform just fine in it.
I have a question about beetles that destroy Heaurcheras. Are these the same bugs that are beneficial in a vegetable garden?
No; they are a different species. The ones attacking your Heucheras are most likely black vine weevils. Here’s more about this pest: https://forums.botanicalgarden.ubc.ca/threads/black-vine-weevil-in-heuchera.89575/