It's a bug buffet: How ladybugs help Resorts World & Las Vegas

I’m on the hunt for bugs. And I’m not the only one.

The guy I'm following down a path near the South Porte Cochere is Brendan Dellerba, the Director of Horticulture at Resorts World Las Vegas. We’re scanning beds full of landscaping.

“I'm just looking for some ladybugs to see if we can find any of 'em,” he told me as we poked through plants around the property, where last week, Resorts World released 100,000 ladybugs.

I asked Dellerba what he expects the ladybugs to do.

“They are going to be ferocious little predators,” he says.

With Earth Day a week from Friday, ladybugs are a much more environmentally friendly way to keep all this landscaping bug-free. Resorts World tells me it is the first Strip resort to do this.

Resorts World did it in partnership with its landscaping company, Park West. On the 88 acre premise, there are about 100 different varieties of trees, shrubs, and grasses.

And all this landscaping amounts to quite the bug buffet for our little orange friends. This is Las Vegas, after all.

For an appetizer, they could munch on an aphid. For the main course, they could dine on a mite. And for dessert, they could savor a leafhopper.

MORE ON NEWS 3 | Over 100,000 ladybugs released at Resorts World Las Vegas for pest management

Dellerba tells me each ladybug will eat 50 insects a day, 5,000 in its lifetime.

Speaking of lifetimes, does he expect the ladybugs to make little ladybugs, or will he have to acquire thousands more each year?

“That's a great question. One of the reasons we released the ladybugs on property is that the majority of the ladybugs released will return each year and reproduce in a similar spot where you released 'em. So we hope to be able to build on the 100,000 that we released this year by continuing to add more year after year,” Dellerba says.

And maybe you think the wind this week would blow all those ladybugs away? Not so, apparently.

“Funny enough, these high winds that we have help the ladybugs hunker down, so we actually lucked out by releasing last week. Most of the ladybugs have probably attached themselves onto most of the branches and trees so they would not blow away,” he says.

We couldn't find any ladybugs today.

And here's one other thing: some of these ladybugs will fly away to take up residence in yards around the valley, maybe eating bugs in your yard. Resorts World says some ladybugs will fly up to 75 miles away from the property, helping Las Vegas fight aphids, which do particular damage to the city’s oaks, pines, citrus, flowers, herbs, and vegetables.