Native Ladybug or Asian Lady Beetle — Which One Do I Have?

New Hampshire has native lady beetle species of its own, and telling them apart from the introduced Asian lady beetle by sight is harder than most homeowners expect — but telling them apart by behavior is not. Native species spend the winter outdoors: in leaf litter, under loose bark, under rocks and garden debris. North Carolina Cooperative Extension describes native ladybugs as living outdoors and overwintering in "garden and landscape debris, not in our homes." A few natives, notably the pink-spotted lady beetle (Coleomegilla maculata), do occasionally wander indoors — UNH Cooperative Extension is explicit that it "invades homes in much lower numbers than the multicolored Asian ladybug" — but nothing close to the scale of what homeowners actually call in about each October.

Harmonia axyridis is a different case. First recorded in New Hampshire in 1994, it is now common across every New England state (UNH Extension), and Illinois Extension notes that homeowners "commonly encounter" it specifically trying to enter homes, not merely visit them. It stages on sun-warmed walls, then works through gaps into wall voids and attics, using a building as a substitute for the rock crevices it aggregates in across its native range. In New Hampshire that staging is seasonally sharp: UNH Cooperative Extension reports the beetles are most numerous on the sunny side of buildings on mild days from mid-September through early November, the window when homeowners actually see the massing that makes the identification obvious. That building-seeking behavior is not something native New Hampshire species do at scale, which is exactly why "is it aggregating on my house" answers the identification question more reliably than any side-by-side color comparison could.

This page is deliberately a router, not a field guide. If what you actually want is a full identification key — the fine print separating look-alike species — /pests carries a dedicated Harmonia axyridis profile built for exactly that job. The one visual cue worth mentioning here, because leaving it out entirely would make this page less useful than it should be, is the white patch on the pronotum (the plate just behind the head) marked with a black "M" or "W" shape; UNH Extension and the wider literature treat that marking as more consistent than elytra colour. Beyond that single cue, resist building a mental checklist out of spot counts or shade of orange — as the next question in this hub explains, that road doesn't lead anywhere reliable.