Our Pet Ladybugs

For my birthday, in October, Jeff got me a ladybug land. It has a coupon to send for Ladybug Larva and you get to watch the whole life cycle. We had to wait for the weather to warm up, or we wouldn't have been able to send them off into our yard. (If you keep them in the ladybug land their life cycle is only 2-3 weeks, but if you let them go after a week, their life cycle is a year. But you can't let them go in cold weather. It seemed cruel to shorten their life by that much. Plus it's fun to get to take them out of the land and watch them fly away.)

Anyway, after our Yosemite trip, I sent away for the larva. Almost everyday after we sent the coupon, Aubrey asked to check and see if the ladybugs came in the mail. So, she was super thrilled when they came a couple of weeks ago.

They come in a little tube with food, and you just dump them into the ladybug land.

Both girls were super excited to get to see bugs crawling all around.



This is what the larva look like.


Then 8 days later, we saw them attach themselves to the dome and some to the bottom of the land and start to curl up.


Then the next day this little yellow puffy thing came out. I thought it was the ladybugs and was confused because the pamphlet said they would be in the pupa stage for 5 days. When they started to turn black and hard, I thought we had done something wrong and killed them. But, I looked online and found out that the yellow blob becomes the pupa and all was well.


Exactly 5 days later we checked our ladybug land and saw a few ladybugs crawling around. They were still yellow, but had their spots so I knew they had emerged just a few hours before.

Then I looked closer and saw that one was emerging right then! This is the ladybug coming out of the pupa. It's all soft and yellow.


The girls were so thrilled to see the ladybugs crawling around!




Brooke is so fascinated with bugs right now - it was such good timing to do this.






In this picture you see on the far right a pupa that a ladybug has not emerged yet from. In the middle is one of our ladybugs that emerged while we were sleeping. The yellow one had just emerged from the pupa to the far left. You can see that the spots are starting to appear on the yellow ladybug.




We kept our ladybugs in the land for about a week. Aubrey loved giving them water every other day. She also was soooo excited for the day that the ladybugs would crawl all over her!


Then this Friday morning we took them out to the garden to let them out. Aubrey was so excited to get to play with them!




A few times Brooke saw the ladybugs and got excited as well.


"Hey, what's that on my shirt?"


Here's Aubrey trying to put the ladybug on Brooke.


Patiently waiting for daddy to get another ladybug out.

It was seriously so fun to watch the whole process. It was also so exciting to see both my little girls so intrigued by the ladybugs. Thanks Jeff for the fun birthday gift!