A BUG FOR LADYBIRDS : PEST-EATING BEETLES LURE COLLECTORS.

Byline: Carlos Alcala The Sacramento Bee

Red and black and hopelessly cute, the ladybug is the focus of one of the most curious and secretive professions in California.

Up and down the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, ladybug collectors are looking over their shoulders as they root through leaf and pine litter, scooping up huge clusters of the beloved beetles from May to January.

Most home gardeners know why the beetles, called ladybirds in some regions and ladybugs in most, are gathered. The bugs wind up in nurseries, sold in small bags to be released on roses and squash plants to eat aphids and other pests.

But few know where they come from, and the collectors like it that way. ``There's so much secrecy in this business,'' said Jerry Bachman, a North Highlands collector who nevertheless consented to let The Bee watch him work, so long as his secrets weren't disclosed.

A reporter and photographer met Bachman in a shopping center parking lot an hour out of Sacramento and then followed him another hour to where he began looking for his quarry.

He repeatedly asked that his techniques not be exposed and that any photographs not divulge any locational clues.

It sounds funny, but the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere surrounding the little bugs is serious.

Several years ago, shots were fired north of Oroville after one bug hunter found others in an area she considered her territory.

While Bachman tries to maintain cordial relations with competitors, he said he has been on the receiving end of threatening notes left where he collects the bugs.

Because of such rivalry and the geography of collecting near streams, there is an inevitable comparison to gold mining. It's a comparison Bachman dislikes, although he was once a miner himself.

His worry is that descriptions of his trade would start a gold bug rush.

With ladybugs selling to distributors at prices around $20 a gallon - there are about 100,000 bugs per gallon - it might seem a lucrative hobby.

But take a look at Bachman's 25-year-old car, and you know he's not getting rich on this, his only job. His vehicle is, of course, a Volkswagen Beetle. No, it's green.

With makeshift tools, Bachman claims he can scoop up 15 gallons in a few hours.

But he also can have bad days, encountering ticks, thorns and rattlesnakes, while finding barely enough ladybugs to cover gas for the four to six hours a day he spends driving.

His only regular companion is Hotei, a red-and-white spaniel left to him when his grown daughter moved out.

Hotei helps make Bachman's long, lonely days bearable. What makes them at all possible is the odd natural history of a particular species of ladybug, Hippodamia convergens.

In late spring and early summer, heat and a shortage of aphids drive them in droves out of the Central Valley.

According to retired UC Berkeley entomologist Kenneth ``I'm Mr. Ladybug'' Hagen, they fly straight up in the air and are carried by high-altitude currents to the hills where they congregate, literally by the millions.

Hagen spent decades trying to figure out an economical way to stop the migration from Valley fields, where they could control a host of agricultural pests.

If he had found out how to keep them down on the farm, it might have squashed the livelihoods of Bachman and other ladybug collectors, who are generally known as pickers, though Bachman doesn't like that name.

``It's sort of like a demeaning term,'' Bachman said.

Bachman is concerned about his image and that of other gatherers. He stressed that he doesn't damage the environment. He didn't want his techniques exposed because, he said, they would appear primitive.

He is self-deprecating about his methods for collecting and finding ladybugs - ``I just stumble on the darn things,'' he said - but there is cleverness behind the simplicity. And there's more than a little quirkiness.

``Anybody who gathers ladybugs is probably pretty eccentric,'' Bachman said, ``if not out-and-out crazy.''

His mind is an archive of locations. He winds in and out of national forests on paved and dirt roads, zeroing in on hunting grounds.

When he parks, he heads directly for a particular clump of trees, where the ladybugs swarm beneath the debris at the base. All around are similar tree groups, but only the one he chooses seems to hold any ladybugs.

The locations are constant, which is why he doesn't want them picked off by another collector.

The collectors sell to wholesalers, including some who handle mail orders to places as far away as Europe. Local companies include Unique Insect, Natural Pest Control and, of course, the Ladybug Company.

It has been a somewhat controversial business. For many years, accepted entomological lore had it that released beetles just bug out without performing the desired pest-control job.

Mary Lou Flint, a UC Davis pest-management specialist, was a proponent of that view, but decided to do some research after hearing consistent anecdotal accounts.

She found properly performed ladybug releases were effective, working about as well as a one-time application of standard insecticides, even though as many as 95 percent of the bugs took off right away.

``It's probably cheaper to use an insecticidal soap spray,'' Flint said. ``But it's more fun to release ladybugs.''

And more fun to catch them, according to Bachman. That's his explanation for why he has collected ladybugs on and off for two decades, despite the rigors of driving and hauling beetles and the hazards of poison oak and mosquitoes.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Jerry Bachman, who makes his living gathering and selling ladybugs for pest control, lets some cling to his hat near Sacramento.

(2) Jerry Bachman scoops some ladybugs.

Associated Press