The eleventh of the twelve labors, retrieving the golden apples of the Hesperides, survives in two genuinely different versions of how Heracles dealt with Ladon, and Apollodorus's Bibliotheca is one of the sources that preserves both possibilities rather than settling on a single account. In the more direct version, Heracles simply kills Ladon outright, generally with an arrow, and takes the apples from the tree himself once the guardian is dead, a straightforward monster-slaying resolution consistent with several of the other labors. In the second, more indirect version, Heracles never personally confronts Ladon at all: knowing he cannot simply walk into the garden and take a wedding gift belonging to Hera without consequence, he instead finds Atlas, holding up the sky nearby, and offers to bear that burden temporarily if Atlas will fetch the apples himself, since Atlas, as father of the Hesperides in some genealogies, could enter the garden without provoking Ladon or Hera the way an outsider might.
The second version leaves Ladon's ultimate fate genuinely unresolved within that telling, since the story's attention moves entirely to Heracles's subsequent difficulty getting Atlas to take the sky's weight back rather than to what became of the dragon in the garden behind them. Later tradition, working from both versions together, generally settled on Ladon's death as the more commonly repeated outcome, reflected in some star-catalogue traditions that placed a serpent constellation in the sky as a memorial to him, but the earlier sources themselves preserve the two accounts side by side rather than treating one as simply correct.