East Anglian ladybirds

On holiday last month I couldn't resist also looking for ladybirds.  Wicken Fen has a lot of grassy meadows as well as wetlands so that seemed a promising place to search.  16-spot Ladybird is a grassland species in the south and was one I was keen to find.  Unlike most ladybirds it feeds on pollen, nectar and fungi.

14-spot Ladybird is pretty widespread and is found in a variety of habitats.  This one is quite pale, probably newly emerged. 

We do find 24-spot Ladybirds in the North East but only in a few localised places.  In East Anglia I found them everywhere I looked and in large numbers.  This is another vegetarian, feeding on grass and red campion leaves.

This is a 24-spot Ladybird larva.

The 22-spot Ladybird is another vegetarian.  This one feeds on mildew on umbellifers but is found in grassland.

Rhyzobius litura is a microladybird and is sometimes known as Meadow Ladybird.

All these, plus 7-spot Ladybird and Harlequin Ladybird turned up in one session in one small patch of grassland.  A couple of days later I went to Cranwich Heath in West Norfolk which is sandy acid heath.  I was hoping to find an Ant-nest Ladybird but did find an Angle-spot Ladybird, Scymnus frontalis.  This is another microladybird, not found here in the North East.  There were lots of 16-spot and 24-spot Ladybirds as well.

There are plenty more I have yet to find, mostly microladybirds and monthly in the south.  I'll have to arrange another holiday to see if I can find some.

A new generation of ladybirds

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.

And a 14-spot Ladybird larva getting in on the action as well.

I also saw an adult 7-spot Ladybird but I can't tell if it is one of the last generation or the first of the next.  Probably the former.

A new ladybird hotspot

In the last three years that I have been looking for ladybirds I have learnt that the best places to find them are on gravestones in winter and in small Scots pine trees in the rest of the year. Some ladybirds are generalists - found in many different habitats - but others are conifer specialists and Scots pine seems to be most favoured.  I have often noticed a group of small self-seeded pines close to the A189 north of Cramlington as I have driven past and I eventually got round to visiting them a few days ago.  It's a pretty unprepossessing spot inside a large traffic interchange and apart from the pines it mostly scrub and litter.  But the trees are what attract the ladybirds and they don't mind the surroundings.  This is the habitat,

and this is an aerial view.

It was immediately apparent that there were ladybirds everywhere.  Every branch of every tree seemed to have a 7-spot Ladybird and there were Pine Ladybirds on almost every tree. Altogether I found 10 species in a place with no previous records (because no-one had looked). There were lots of great pine aphids as well which is presumably why the ladybirds were there. 

The species I found were:

Pine Ladybird.  Despite the name it is found in many habitats.

Adonis Ladybird.  Another one that seems to turn up anywhere.

Larch Ladybird.  Mostly a conifer specialist.

2-spot Ladybird.  A generalist.

10-spot Ladybird.  Often in deciduous trees but can turn up anywhere.  I found two colour forms - decempunctata and decempustulata.

7-spot Ladybird.  The most ubiquitous ladybird and very abundant everywhere at the moment.

Harlequin Ladybird.  Also common and widespread but I found only two.

Eyed Ladybird.  Our largest species and another conifer specialist.  A real beauty.

Striped Ladybird.  Perhaps the prettiest of all and mostly found in or close to Scots pine. Usually hard to find but this was the most I have seen in one place.

Pine scymnus.  Really tiny (<2mm) and the only micro ladybird I found.

It was absorbing to find so many species in one small spot.  I expect it will be worth another visit in a few weeks time when there will be larvae to look for as well.

End of year favourites - Ladybirds

2025 was my third year of looking for ladybirds and I continued to find new species.  The highlight was finding the Scarce 7-spot Ladybird in Northamptonshire in September.  It was the third time I had been to look for it, and very satisfying.  It is shown above with the very common 7-spot Ladybird which had a good year and was seen in great numbers all over the country, even interrupting a test match.  Here's another view of the Scarce 7-spot.

I posted it on this blog, finishing off by saying that my next target was the Hieroglyphic Ladybird, one I had been to look for in various places several times.  And the very next day I found two, only a couple of miles from here while I wasn't even looking for them.  Previously very rare in the North East (and everywhere else), there were several reports up here this summer so this is another species that had a good year.

The Hieroglyphic Ladybird also has a melanic form and I found one of those a few days later.

Another new species came from my mother's garden.  This one is tiny, the appropriately named Dot Ladybird, one of a group known as inconspicuous ladybirds or microladybirds, which are small, usually hairy, and mainly lack spots.

Here is another one, not quite as small but also black, Scymnus nigrinus, also known as the Black Ladybird.

And another, this time with spots, Nephus quadrimaculatus, also known as Ivy Ladybird.  This one is about 2mm.

And Rhyzobius chrysomeloides, both these last two from Mum's garden as well.  This one is 3mm.

Another species that thrived in 2025 was Adonis' Ladybird.  I had only seen two before but there were lots to find this year.

Finally a few favourites from the many dozens of other photos I could have included.  A Striped Ladybird,

a 2-spot Ladybird, f sexpustulata,

an 18-spot Ladybird,

and a 10-spot Ladybird, f decempustulata.  I'll be on the lookout for more new species next year.