It's a Ladybug's Life!

Letting Our Ladybugs be Free

My daughter was so excited to get an Insect Lore Ladybug Land habitat from one of her friends for her birthday.  At first, she wasn’t sure what to do with it since the live insects needed to be ordered and sent to our home via snail mail.  So she played with the enclosure for a few days, finding her smallest toys, which just fit in it.  I let her know what day the bugs would be arriving and explained to her that they would not look like ladybugs yet, but were larvae.  Fortunately, since she recently had a lesson on butterfly lifecycles at her preschool, the larval stage was fresh in her memory.

Nineteen little bugs arrived in a tube on a Friday.  My daughter anxiously watched as I slid the little creatures and their food into their new home and gave them a couple droplets of water.  But to my daughter, the larvae were so small and strange-looking, her attention started to waver.  I quickly found videos of ladybugs on the internet to keep her excitement high for these new bugs.  Luckily, by the next day, the larvae were nearly twice as big, very active, and much more visible.  The change was perfect to keep her interest high.  These bugs ate and ate and grew bigger and bigger each day.  My daughter even asked us to buy a magnifying glass to help her see them better.  

 

Because it was very important not to over water the little bugs, I took charge of giving them water using the pipette provided with the habitat.  My three year old doesn’t quite have the fine motor skills required to gently squeeze the bulb of the pipette to consistently produce only one droplet of water at a time yet.  So after my watering chore each day, she practiced using the pipette herself, which is an excellent activity for kids her age.

Larva, Pupa, and Adult Stages

On day five, the first larva turned into a pupa.  By the end of the next day, they had all changed, and then there was no movement in the habitat for days.  Fortunately, the instructions gave us an estimate of when to expect the adults to emerge; therefore, we knew we didn’t have long to wait.  We were prepared with a rehydrated raisin cut in half for their food.  And four days later, our first adult ladybug emerged!  The rest followed over the next two days.  I was lucky enough to watch and record one emerging using time-lapse videography while my daughter napped.  This allowed me to show her later what was happening without her shorter attention span preventing her from watching in real time.  She was amazed and watched the video over and over again!

Mating Behavior

When a ladybug emerges from the pupa stage, it climbs out of the bottom of the hard exoskeleton, leaving it behind.  The newly emerged adult is soft and off-white in color without spots.  It rests and dries its body for awhile, stretching its wings and legs only occasionally while slowly gaining its familiar ladybug coloring.  During the first day, it doesn’t really move much.  Then on day two as an adult, it moves everywhere, taking short breaks to eat and drink.  We even witnessed mating behavior!  Our ladybugs seemed to only calm down when the lights were off.  It was fun watching them travel during the day, but it made them difficult to count while my daughter eagerly watched.  I’m happy to report, while they were at rest, I counted and all nineteen insects made it to the adult stage.

Last Saturday, we turned them loose.  It was nice to watch all of the ladybugs crawl away.  A few even attempted to fly away.  My daughter was a little sad and questioned several times why we needed to set them free, but she enjoyed watching the bugs crawl over the plants and in the leaf litter.  She agreed that it will be nice to have them living in our yard; although, she thinks we’ll be able to find them again easily.  Luckily, the ladybug habitat is able to be used again and again for raising more ladybugs!

Making a Ladybug Keepsake

Since this project took two weeks, I decided we needed to make a keepsake of our experience.  So I bought a small canvas and acrylic paint to make a handprint bush with 19 ladybugs made from fingerprints.  I painted the canvas blue the day before and let it dry overnight.  The next day, I painted my daughter’s hand a dark green color and let her put her handprint on the canvas, with my help, and we let it dry.  For the next step, I painted her other hand a light green color and again helped her to put her handprint on the canvas on top of the first handprint.  The handprints made the bush.  After the bush was completely dry, I painted her index finger red, and she proceeded to make 19 fingerprints on the bush, one for each ladybug we raised.  After that was dry, I took a black paint pen and completed the look of each ladybug.  It turned out to be a beautiful keepsake of our first experience with ladybugs that we will never forget!

Ladybug Keepsake