Ladybug Meadow: a winter getaway for a beloved insect

Jon Hammond.

Lady beetles cling to the underside of a Jeffrey Pine cone.

Up in the mountains south of the town of Tehachapi is a little opening in the forest where tens of thousands of ladybugs gather each year to overwinter in dense clusters of orange and black beetles. Entomologists call them Convergent Lady Beetles (Hippodamia convergens).

Of course most of us know them as "ladybugs," but scientists prefer other terms because there is a distinct group of insects known as "bugs," such as milkweed bugs or boxelder bugs, that have different characteristics from lady beetles. So lady beetles are not "bugs" in that more specific sense of the word.

It can be difficult to change a long-established common name, however, as marine biologists have found in trying to get the general public not to use the name "fish" for creatures like starfish (sea stars), or jellyfish (sea jellies), that aren't fish at all.

It is an especially daunting nomenclature change when everyone has been taught the old rhyme "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. . ." The French term for lady beetles is "les betes du bon Dieu" or "creatures of the good Lord," which is a long but pleasant name. In Irish Gaelic and in Polish, the name for ladybug means "God's little cow," and in Turkey their name means "good luck bug."

Jon Hammond.

Convergent Lady Beetles coat a young willow sapling like orange bark.

I call one gathering place in the mountains "Ladybug Meadow," and I have been returning to observe lady beetles overwintering there for many years. It is near the headwaters of Tehachapi Creek where water flows year-round, and it has the ideal components for a lady beetle overwintering site: mountain location, higher moisture, afternoon sunlight, and protection from wind.

And as I mentioned earlier, they aren't hundreds or thousands of lady beetles that assemble here, there are literally tens of thousands. It is the biggest aggregation I have ever seen.

There are many places in the Tehachapi Mountains where convergent lady beetles gather, however, and I've found these overwintering sites near Chanac Creek in Stallion Springs, at the Water Canyon Campground in Bear Valley Springs and near Caliente Creek. They definitely like to be near a water source.

This period of relative inactivity is called diapause, and during this time the lady beetles do not mate, lay eggs or even eat much. Sometimes on warm afternoons you'll see some of them flying but the bulk of them seem to just crawl around or cluster together like college students at Lake Havasu.

Jon Hammond.

Lady Beetles on foliage above Tehachapi Creek.

They spend the winter like this, and then when spring arrives the lady beetles disperse down into the valleys, flowing out of the mountains like an aerial stream. Day after day they fly down Water Canyon, and if you drive up Water Canyon Road toward Tehachapi Mountain Park you encounter convergent lady beetles flying their way down, their orange wing cases glinting in the sun.

They arrive in gardens and fields throughout the area in search of their favorite prey, aphids, which they devour in large numbers, as well as scale insects, thrips and other tiny prey.

Convergent Lady Beetles will also eat pollen and flower nectar if small insects are in short supply. They are typically orange with six black spots on each of their two wing covers (called an elytron), but some individuals may have fewer spots and others none at all. However they all have two white lines on their prothorax, the body segment right behind their head and just in front of their wing covers. These white lines are angled towards each other, or converging like a white V, and this is actually the source of their common name, not the fact that they converge together in the mountains each winter.

In the larval stage, ladybugs have no wings and look like little Gila monsters, and it is these hungry youngsters that are the most voracious predators of aphids and other soft-bodied insects.

A generation or two of Convergent Lady Beetles will be produced in the summer, and then the adults fly back up into the mountains to overwinter, many of them heading to Ladybug Meadow. And so the rhythms of life continue, year after year, in the valleys, hills, canyons and mountains that surround us.

Keep enjoying the beauty of life in the Tehachapi Mountains.

Jon Hammond is a fourth generation Kern County resident who has photographed and written about the Tehachapi Mountains for 38 years. He lives on a farm his family started in 1921, and is a speaker of Nuwä, the Tehachapi Indian language. He can be reached at [email protected].

Jon Hammond.

Tehachapi Creek flows year-round in the mountains and provides the higher moisture levels that make Ladybug Meadow ideal for the overwintering insects.