BUG BUSINESS : Demand for commercially produced insect predators has never been higher as farmers seek alternatives to pesticides.

The tools are simple; the task is anything but.

Entomologist Don Norlund is holed up in a bug-filled Weslaco, Tex., laboratory, armed with nothing but cardboard grids and swaths of filmy organza cloth, trying mightily to drag the insect industry into the 20th Century.

“Right now, the industry is not using neat technology to produce beneficial insects,” said Norlund, a research entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It is not automated to any extent whatsoever. It’s a lot of manual labor.”

Thanks to aldicarb, a pesticide that contaminated watermelons in 1985, and alar, a chemical growth regulator that frightened consumers in 1989, an increasing number of farmers are searching for non-chemical methods of pest control, and breeders of beneficial bugs throughout North America are having a field day.

Demand is outstripping supply for the first time in the industry’s short life. And nowhere is the bug boom more evident than in California, which has a corner on the creepy-crawly market.

But it’s no simple task to breed beneficial bugs--like green lacewings--that eat bad bugs--such as aphids. The process is low tech and labor intensive. There are no quality-control standards. Only one in three insectaries actually rears the bugs that it sells.

And while interest in so-called biological control--pesticide-free methods of growing crops--is at an all-time high, some say the infant insect industry is not up to the challenge.

“Mass rearing methods have to be developed and maintained and quality control programs must be worked up,” said Marjorie Hoy, professor of entomology at the University of California, Berkeley. “The industry is going to have to police itself . . . or people will go back to chemicals. We don’t want this to happen.”

Enter Don Norlund, the bug world’s Henry Ford wanna-be. For the past year, Norlund has been trying to find a way to mass produce green lacewings, a predatory insect that will attack nearly any soft-bodied bug that crosses its path.

His project is the nation’s first large-scale attempt to automate the bug business, to “gear the system up to a commercial level,” he said.

Right now, feeding the bugs is extremely inefficient. Because they are cannibalistic, they must be kept apart in half-inch square compartments in small cardboard grids, he said. The grid has no top or bottom, but is covered with strips of organza, a thin, stiff fabric commonly used for women’s hats and bridal gowns.

To feed the lacewings, strips of flannel are soaked in synthetic liquid food and laid underneath the grid, and the bugs suck the liquid out through the organza. The problem is that up to 90% of the food stays in the flannel and is wasted. So Norlund and his research group are trying to create a diet for the lacewings that resembles insect eggs--prepackaged, intact, cost-effective and efficient.

Harvesting lacewing eggs for sale is also a problem. The bugs secrete a substance that forms tiny “stalks” on which they lay their eggs, presumably to keep them off the ground and away from ants, which will eat the pale green ovals.

“We are trying to design a cage that . . . would allow you to mechanically harvest the eggs off their little stalks,” he said. “Right now, it’s being done by hand. We brush the eggs with a little piece of wadded nylon cloth. It breaks the stalks of lots of them, but it also squashes lots. We’re looking at ways of creating a hot wire to burn the stalk below the eggs and suck the eggs up with a vacuum cleaner.”

When you figure that it takes up to 20,000 lacewings per acre per season to bring aphids, whiteflies, scale and mealybugs under control, you can see why technology is so important to the insect industry.

Without it, bug watchers say, insectaries will never be able to supply the number of insects necessary to make biological control a viable alternative to chemical pesticides.

Rincon-Vitova Insectaries Inc. of Ventura County is cooperating with Norlund in his attempt to automate the industry. Arguably the oldest, largest and most established insectary in North America, Rincon-Vitova is also the most efficient producer of the dozen species of insects that it rears and sells.

“These guys are some of the best producers of beneficial insects in the country,” Norlund said, “but it’s still not the type of technology that you need to produce the numbers of beneficials that it will require to replace a significant amount of insecticide.”

Still, it’s enough to give Rincon-Vitova customers in all 50 states and six foreign countries and to generate more than $1 million in sales for the company annually--a good chunk of a market that’s estimated at $25 million worldwide. That figure would be larger, but for the Soviet Union and China, where biological control is a government, rather than a private enterprise.

The USDA and the California Department of Food and Agriculture list 68 suppliers of beneficial organisms in 19 states and Canada. California is atop the insect heap, with 29 of those enterprises. Texas is next with five.

“California is a pretty progressive state,” said Jake Blehm, Rincon-Vitova’s vice president for marketing and communications. “There isn’t a farmer here who doesn’t know what biological control is. But there are a lot of places in the country where they don’t have an inkling, the middle-aged farmers who started during the chemical era when pesticides were wonder drugs.”

Bug Shortages

Still, in the past several years, grocery shoppers have clamored for pesticide-free produce like never before, and many farmers have responded by kicking their chemical habits and buying beneficial bugs from insectaries such as Rincon-Vitova.

“Last year, we had a predatory mite shortage because of demand from strawberry growers,” Blehm said. “We’ve also had lacewing shortages. We had to quit taking orders in June, July and late May.”

A lack of ladybugs has also been a problem since 1987, Blehm said, but only in part because of consumer demand. Ladybugs--the aphid-eating Hippodamia convergens-- do not reproduce well enough on a synthetic diet to make them economical to rear.

So suppliers depend on roving bands of bug-pickers who trek through the High Sierra in search of the orange-and-black insects. Hippodamia convergens hibernate through the California winters in inches-thick beds at the base of pine trees, hidden beneath layers of dead leaves and pine needles. Harvesters scoop them up and sell them to suppliers such as Rincon-Vitova and Fountain’s Sierra Bug Co., which is based in Rough and Ready, Calif.

“Ladybugs are getting so scarce, you can’t get enough to keep people happy,” said H. H. Fountain, the company’s owner. “From 1974 to 1977, we sold three to four times as many bugs as we do now. There were a lot more bugs to be had to begin with.”

Forest fires, logging and urban encroachment are the major culprits in the ladybug shortage, Fountain said. “Loggers tear the beds up completely to where the bugs won’t come back,” he mourned. “Forest fires will burn them out.”

Research Needed

And then there’s research support--or the lack thereof. An estimated $450 million in mostly private funding is spent each year on research and development for chemical pesticides, according to Kenneth Cook, director of a Washington-based environmental research group called the Center for Research Economics.

In contrast, he said, the USDA spends only about $20 million each year on biological control research. Concern is so great that a recent National Academy of Sciences study called for an additional $40 million annually to be spent on research into alternative methods of agriculture.

“Biological control has been seriously neglected,” Cook said. “The $20 million is an optimistic number. The potential has not nearly been exploited. When you look at pesticides, which are ranked by the Environmental Protection Agency as one of the great health risks, it’s really ludicrous that we’re spending as little as we are on biological control.”

Hoy of UC Berkeley has spent years breeding an improved strain of predatory mites--beneficial bugs that clear fields of pest mites. While she has shared the better bugs with commercial insectaries, she said there is far too little of that give and take. As a result, Hoy said, it’s tough to get new bugs from the lab to the marketplace.

“First of all, you have to convince someone that it’s going to work and that it’s worth their while to learn how to use it and mass rear and sell it,” she said. “The transfer of information from researcher to consumer is really difficult.”

Adding such problems as the ladybug shortage and the dearth of research support to the sheer drudgery of insect rearing, makes it easy to see why there aren’t more producing insectaries. For not only must insect breeders rear beneficial insects, they often must rear the pests, too, to give the beneficials something to eat.

“It’s surprising,” Blehm said. “Probably 75% of the time, effort, labor and resources goes to rearing host insects. We could get rid of 75% of our space if we didn’t have to do that.”

It’s not unlike feeding humans, he said, whereby it takes expanses such as Kansas and Nebraska to sustain an island such as Manhattan. Rincon-Vitova sells fly parasites, so it has to breed common houseflies. The company sells lacewings, so it has to breed a moth called sitotroga, too.

“If we had a reliable source for insects,” Blehm said, “we’d get out of production and go entirely into retail and consulting. That’s the neat part of the business. The growing part is the drudgery. But at this point in time, we haven’t found anyone as reliable as we are.”

1 THE LADYBUG

Also called ladybird, it was introduced in California in the late 19th Century to help save the fruit crop from a scale infestation. Since 1987, the bugs have been growing scarce as habitats and breeding grounds disappear.

2 DIET

Feeds chiefly on aphids

and scale insects. Does not

reproduce well on a synthetic diet.

3 THE FAMILY

A small round beetle, usually bright red or yellow with black, red, white or yellow spots. Belongs to the order Coleoptera and make up the family Coccinellidae . There are about 150 species.

4 LIFE CYCLE

Ladybugs hibernate through the winter by crawling under pine needles and leaves.

CRYPTOLAEMUS

Known as the “Mealybug Destroyer.” An Australian import and member of the ladybug family, adults are black with orange head and tail.

PREDATORY MITES Beneficial varieties feed on pest mites, consuming between 5 and 20 mites--or their eggs--a day. Adults are orange with a pear-shaped body.

GREEN LACEWING A voracious predator that feeds on virtually any soft-bodied insect. Adults are a delicate green and about three-quarters of an inch long.

Source: Rincon-Vitova Insectaries Inc.