The day before Mother's Day Maddie, Wyatt and I were at the local nursery buying some flowers. They carry ladybugs and praying mantis's - but were all out of lady bugs. We looked at the pictures of the larvae and the image of the buggies really stood out in my mind.
A few days before that Maddie had come to me with one of those tall, weedy pieces of grass - yelling that she found a lady bug.
It was a lady bug and two other weird looking bugs just kind of hanging out with it. She was in awe and I was proud of my daughter for finding cool things in our yard.
I walked back outside a little while later and she informed me that she no longer liked those bugs and so she'd smushed them.
I was a little upset and tried to explain to her that she'd just killed innocent little bugs- whatever kind they were.
Fast forward to Mother's Day - it dawned on me that those 2 funny looking bugs were actually lady bug larvae.
They look like this:
So this discovery started a little science experiment in our yard. We accidentally discovered that our lady bugs really loved the lantana growing in our yard. We quickly found several ladybug pupaes on the underside of leaves:
We picked a few of the leaves and put them in a spare aquarium in the hopes of seeing a lady bug emerge:
The leaves didn't last very long, but we had 2 lady bugs "hatch" and are waiting for 2 more to come out and play:
I actually bought maddie a book about lady bugs a few weeks ago and we were able to learn everything we needed to know about the life cycle of a lady bug. Our moments outside are spent hunting for lady bugs and we've realized that we are a rich environment for the friendly bugs as there are lots of aphids - their favorite foods and everywhere we look we find either mature lady bugs or larvae and were even able to find some eggs yesterday!
Unfortunately for me, the eggs were laid on one of my towels so I have to wait for the eggs to hatch in a few days so I can wash my towel. Right now it's crawling with itty bitty larvae.
eggs:
newly hatched egglets:
a different batch on the same towel:
Once the eggs hatch the larvae eat like crazy until they have to molt and get bigger. I caught this little guy trying to wiggle the rest of the way out of his old skin:
the other popular place in our yard is the discarded propane tank:
he finally wiggled free - i helped him a little bit - he'd been struggling for almost an hour! I just held the backside down firmly and he finally popped out!:
Here you can see a pupae and a larvae right under it!
You see a lot of ladybugs hanging near the larvae- I even saw one today that was pushing a larvae around literally!
a few other ladybug pictures:
it's been a great lesson for maddie. She hasn't killed a bug since discovering that lady bugs are friendly creatures. She'll even let them climb on her arms now :)
(more later, can't keep my eyes open)
1 comment:
Wow! I learn a lot from your blog! LOL. That's so neat though that Maddie learned so much from it!
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