The parasitic wasp is my fave. This lad injects their eggs into the living bodies of aphids, then proceeds to suck the life out of the said bug, before hatching out of the now mummified victim a few days later. 

It just so happens that the aphid is a particular bug-bear (if you’ll excuse the pun) of mine on my flowers at the moment.

As we try to grow an ever wider range of flower, we are finding that there was a good reason why we avoided many of them in the first place.

Roses are a good example. You can grow absolutely stunning roses, with the most intricate patterns in their plump, luminous heads. 

We have been targeting roses with fragrance since this is something that you just can’t get in most flower shops, and certainly not in a supermarket. 

But boy oh boy, do aphids love roses! I thought Dahlias were bad, but these seem to be cat-nip for the little green buggers. 

So we’ve found ourselves out with the knapsack sprayer unleashing all kinds of nasty poison on the insect invasion. 

The advice from Holland even goes as far as recommending an application every week. 

This type of system sickens me. It’s not sustainable, and flies in the face of everything that we are striving for.

Hence, my interest in unleashing the mayhem and murderous antics of predator insects in my polytunnels.

I was guilty of dismissing them up to now as something slightly futuristic that would either be impractical or too costly for my humble set-up.

But the bug men that flog these products – yes that is an actual job - assure me that, similar to the world of IT, there is a fix for every bug.

So, even if my tunnels are wide open at the ends and sides, we can focus on using non-flying types of mites. 

In fact, I’m told I can even benefit from the use of these little critters out in the field. 

And what about the possibility of creating an even bigger problem with all these killer insects we are effectively releasing into the wild?

Apparently, many of the bugs used are actually native. That murderous parasitic wasp referred to earlier is all around us, but because he’s just a quarter the size of an ant, we’re completely oblivious to them.

The cost will be a bit more than the poison from the can, but I think I’m happy to suck this up, so to speak.

It might surprise you to hear that there are well over 1,000 acres of protected crops grown in Ireland, with strawberries and lettuce accounting for the majority of that. 

So it’s only logical that there is now €1m of bugs sold to growers here annually, with that figure growing by 5-10pc annually.

More and more insecticides are being banned, forcing more and more growers to switch to these previously exotic methods of pest control.

If only I had paid more attention during those entomology lectures in first year in UCD. 

I thought it was for the birds, literally, when actually it would have allowed me to converse much more knowledgeably with the bug-man when he called. 

What’s the difference between a pupae and a larvae? Do aphids reproduce sexually or asexually, and if so, does it matter? I’m off to look for some of those old text books.

Darragh McCullough runs a mixed enterprise at Elmgrove Farm in Meath