Not all bugs are bad. Most gardeners know that ladybugs or lady beetles are voracious aphid eaters and very welcome in the garden. What many don't know is that the in the nymph stage, these beetles are almost unrecognizable and they look like something you don't want on your plant's leaves. Learning to recognize the good guys is an important part of integrated pest management in the garden.

Squiggly lines through a plant's leaves usually signal the work of leaf miners. Leaf miners are the larva of various insects. Eggs that were laid on the leaves hatch and the larva burrow inside the leaf tissue, feeding their way through the leaf and leaving a transparent trail of where they've been. Some plants, like columbine, are especially prone to leaf miners. Here are some tips for controlling or maybe even avoiding leaf miner damage.

Scale insects look like little bumps along the stems of plants and are often mistaken for some type of disease. They adhere themselves to the plant and suck on the plant's juices, drying it out and causing serious damage. There are thousands of species of scale and each type has their favorite plants to feast on, so many plants can become infected with scale. Mealy bugs, those fussy, cottony covered insects often found on stems and in stem and leaf joints, are in the scale family. Here's how to get rid of scale insects on plants.

Is there any garden pest as reviled as the Japanese Beetle. As an adult it can defoliate plants in an afternoon. As a grub is destroys your lawn. And there alarming rate of reproduction makes matters even worse. The pheromone traps that are often sold to control adult Japanese beetles in your yard were actually developed to monitor the size of the Japanese beetle population: meaning they were designed to attract every beetle in the area. You don't want to do that. Here are some better suggestions.

Every now and then you'll see a clump of foam on one of your plants that looks like someone spit on it. Close. It's probably the spittlebug at work. The actual bug is very tiny and he's hiding from predators under this mass of froth. It fools the birds, but it's a red flag for gardeners. Don't let it worry you. Spittlebugs do little damage to the plant and they'll be on there way in no time flat. Curious about what's in the foam? Here's more about spittlebugs.