Garden Pests and Diseases: Friend or Foe #4, 0 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
tripletmomma - I agree with konkreteblonde. That was a lovely picture of a hover fly, and I should've commented on it before. There are also larger hover flies, but it is generally the smaller ones like yours that eat the aphids. The larger hover flies are the ones that eat in your compost pile when it gets wet and soggy. I might post a picture of them later when I find a good one (I know I have one somewhere).

As for things that eat cucmber beetles and similar leaf eating beetles, usually it is the predatory bugs that you are looking for. I may have already posted this picture, but just in case, here it is again. That isn't a cucumber beetle in the picture, but it is in the same family (Chrysomelidae) and likes to chomp leaves. After looking at my Garden Insects of North America book, I believe the pest is called a yellowmargined leaf beetle. It likes to eat crucifers. The predatory bug is a predatory stink bug in the Pentatomidae family. This one is a spiny (or spined) soldier bug nymph. And as some of the regulars to this thread can probably tell you, the way to tell the predatory stink bugs like this one from the plant eating kind is that short, fat "beak" that it is sticking into the leaf beetle. A plant sucking stink bug will have a longer, thinner "beak" (a stylet in scientific jargon).