Welcome to jACKrABBIT! Here you can buy seeds for growing your own produce and ingredients for cooking and baking, you can find recipes for everyday and for preserving home-grown food and find activities and ideas for getting you and your children out of doors and enjoying nature. We also sell native wildflower seeds to encourage those important bees and butterflies into your garden.

*Ladybirds




Hand Knitted Ladybird Finger Puppet
We have a selection of hand knitted minibeast finger puppets which encourage children to enjoy the garden and get outdoors. This post contains lots of information about ladybirds, and the puppet comes with details for building a ladybird sanctuary in the garden. Puppets cost £2.90 each, £5 for 2 and £11.50 for all 5; to order and to find out more please click here.


Across the whole planet there are many different kinds of ladybirds, about 5,000 different kinds in fact. They come in all sorts of colours, sizes and also vary in the number of spots they have. Their favourite food are little green aphids which often eat and damage the plants and flowers in the garden, so ladybirds are really useful!
QUESTION. About how many green aphids can a ladybird eat in their lifetime?
a) 500
b) 5,000
c) 50,000
Go to the bottom of the post to find out.  

Most of you will have seen ladybirds and know what they look like, but they don't start out looking like that. They don't look like the ladybird here either, a little girl has dressed up as a ladybird. You could try dressing up as a ladybird too. Ask a grown-up for some red fabric or an old piece of red clothing and they can help you paint some black dots on it. You could also cut out a large piece of card and paint it in the design you want, then push holes into it and use string to tie it to your back. Don't forget, you can try other coloured ladybirds; how about yellow with black spots or black with red spots?


Ladybird Life Cycle


In spring an adult ladybird will lay its tiny yellow eggs in a safe place, like underneath a leaf. 
It only takes a week for the eggs to hatch, and out comes the ladybird larvae. They are very hungry and like to eat green aphids as well.
The larva will attach itself to a leaf and make a pupa around itself to protect it while it turns into a....

LADYBIRD!!

It takes about a month for the ladybird to go through the life cycle from egg to adult. When the winter comes the fully grown ladybird will hibernate till the next year.







ANSWER: b) 5,000
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