What are beneficial insects? These are insects that are helping your landscape and not causing harm by feeding on your crop, landscape plants, or turfgrass. Typically, beneficials feed on insects that are causing harm (pests).
Many of the beneficials are related to bees and wasps and serve two-fold: as pollinators and as predators of pest insects. To attract beneficials, plant a diverse landscape. By diverse, I mean a variety of kinds of plants so that you have flowering going on at various times and differences in shading, leafing, plant height, etc.
Since many predator insects are bees and wasps, they derive nutrition from flowers. This helps sustain their population levels when pests are not present. They need a place for shelter also. The worst thing you could do for the beneficials is have a monoculture (one kind of plant). In this situation, pest levels would build to high levels before enough beneficials could be attracted to feed and reduce the population.
Pests levels would build, beneficials levels would build. Pests levels would crash, followed by beneficials levels as their food source is depleted.
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