Ladybugs!!!

Since school's been out I've been taking a summer break from blogging. However, I wanted to share one of our summer projects that has been a lot of fun. We skipped the insect unit earlier in the year because it was just too cold out for our little insects.  I planned on doing the ant farm and instead of butterflies, Boo asked to do ladybugs! Well we still haven't gotten to ants, but I've had the ladybug kit from Insect Lore since last summer. Now that the weather is nice and we've had a good break from any school work, we decided it was time to adopt our little lady's.

When they first arrived we were pretty surprised. Baby ladybugs looks nothing like what you think of when you think of a ladybug! In fact just like caterpillars they start out in a totally different form and morph into something new! These little guys start out as black and yellow stripped bugs with lots of legs. They are long and not shaped like an adult ladybug.

Our little bugs arrived in a plastic tube along with enough ladybug food to keep them fed until they would be released.We prepared our little habitat, opened the tube, and released our ladybug larva. Boo was so excited about her new "pets," that she named them all. 

I wanted to keep this project simple. It is summer after all! So we didn't do any crafts or much reading/studying about ladybugs. Instead we just observed them each day and talked about what we saw. I think this will stick better than reading about what happens in a book anyway.

At first our ladybugs were really active, crawling all over the habitat. Nothing really seemed to change for a couple days. then we noticed they started to slow down and some were not moving around at all. Many of them seemed to be stuck to the sides of the dome. These still ladybugs soon seemed to be curling up into black balls, tucking their "tails," or bottom halves underneath the rest of their bodies. They stayed like this for days just hanging there seemingly doing nothing!

Then we noticed that a few of them turned into bright yellow sacs. They only stayed like this for about an hour before they looked like black balls again! Weird!

We watched our little ladybug sacs for almost a week before anything new happened, then one day we had ladybugs! Of the 15 or so that we started with about 5 of them never made it past the pupa stage. Those shriveled up, so we could tell they had died. I'm kind of sad that we didn't actually get to see one when it first changed. One minute it was black ball and then next time we looked they were ladybugs! I let Boo keep them for a few days. Then today we set them free. Boo did cry a little when I told her today was the day she had to let go of her new pets. She cheered up though as we watched them leave. For the first time they all started spreading their wings and flying around before we ever opened the dome! It was like they knew they were being set free and were happy!

  We got this awesome picture of Boo's favorite ladybug "Lila" enjoying her new home, before we said goodbye (she claims she can tell them apart.)