I noticed a patch of ladybird eggs on the tine of a hand cultivator in the kitchen garden. It seemed an odd place to lay eggs with no food for larvae within easy walking distance. As you would expect I brought it in to take some photos and waited to see what happened. For reference the patch of 44 eggs above is about the size of a 7-spot Ladybird and the eggs are about 1mm long.
The next morning I noticed a spider had moved in and spun some silk. I wasn't sure if this was setting a trap for the larvae but later that day the spider was gone although some silk remained.
Two days later, early in the morning the larvae were hatching. You can see that in fact it is the larvae that are yellow and the eggs are white. Very soon the larvae were turning black.
Less than two hours later all but two eggs had hatched and half the larvae were black.
At nine hours this was the view with most larvae black.
I put the cultivator out in the meadow overnight, expecting that the larvae would move off to find something to eat but next morning it looked as though they were all still in place. This is the view at 24 hours after hatching. The larvae look significantly bigger.
And this was the view at 34 hours and there seemed to be fewer larvae. The cultivator was back in the meadow between photos so some could have moved away but ladybird larvae are notoriously cannibalistic so I wonder if some of the bigger ones had eaten some of the smaller ones. Who knows?
By 48 hours they had all gone and most of the remaining egg shells looked to have been eaten by slugs.
Ladybird eggs and new larvae all look pretty much the same and can't be identified to species. As they get older the larvae develop individual markings and can usually be identified. The eggs are laid over several weeks, mostly from late spring to mid summer. Elsewhere in the meadow I could see lots of 7-spot Ladybird larvae of different sizes and ages feasting on the blackfly on the knapweed.
What a brilliant record of the process of hatching and development.
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