For C.A.L., Auburn, looking for a product similar to Tender Vittles cat food (Sun Spots inquiry, April 11), Wendy Tremblay at Pet Quarters in Auburn has discovered the following method which works well for her cats. Find a hard cat food that your cat will enjoy. Separate one portion of the cat food and place on top of a piece of bread in a resealable baggy. Seal the bag, let it sit for about two days and the food should be of a similar consistency to Tender Vittles. Tremblay has tried this in small portions, as she feeds them to her cat as treats. You may need to experiment with the portion size. Good Luck!

Dear Sun Spots: Enjoy your column! We have been bothered with a lot of ladybugs. We have an older house and an attic, and that may be where they come from. – No Name, Rumford.

Answer: Sun Spots can relate to your dilemma as we have them in our home in abundance at the beginning of spring and fall. According to the Maine Farmhouse Journal Web site, ladybugs are really a beetle and have long been considered a gardener’s friend, because of its prodigious appetite for plant-damaging aphids. One adult female ladybug can consume up to 75 aphids a day, and the smaller male may consume up to 40. They are also shipped around the world as a biological control agent for garden and tree pests. They note that for several days during autumn they typically cluster on sunny, southwest sides of light-colored rock outcroppings or structures.

The Web site offers the following information on preventing the ladybugs from entering your home: seal cracks around windows, doors, siding, utility pipes or other openings with a good quality caulk. Replace or repair damaged screens, and install screens over roof vents. Remove indoor concentrations of ladybugs with a vacuum cleaner with a crevice tool. They caution against killing the ladybugs with insecticides, harassing or squashing them. Even handling them will stress them and ladybugs will leave orange stains on walls and fabrics through reflex bleeding. Ladybugs do not bite, sting, spread disease, infest food, or damage clothing or wood. In other words, gently remove them (vacuuming is fine) and dump them outside where they can feed on aphids.

If you tire of vacuuming up them up every day, there is a pheromone-based attractant to collect ladybugs inside the house for removal outdoors. “Eau de Ladybug” is available at Gardeners Supply Co., 1-800-863-1700.

They also discovered that populations vary with time. We can expect four to five years of a population explosion, and then the population crashes. This could be caused by lack of food, or by some disease or parasite attacking the population. Researchers feel that eventually the population will stabilize. They predict that we will probably always have some small number of ladybugs attracted to our homes, but hopefully, we won’t get the multitudes we’ve been seeing. However, that prediction that the population would crash was made nearly five years ago, and hasn’t come true yet, if the reports of huge numbers of ladybugs is any indication.

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