How to Build a Ladybug House
This ladybug house is easy to build and only requires a few supplies. It is a fun, educational activity you can do with your children. Isn’t it always wonderful when we can help make learning fun and completely natural? We do that best when we can interweave it into our everyday lives, and this project is a great example of that!
Important note: If you don’t have ladybugs in your yard, you’ll want to order some. (Yes! You can order ladybugs from Amazon!) You may need to plan ahead and order your ladybugs so they’ll be ready once you’ve built your ladybug house. Or, like we did, you can build your ladybug house and then do our fun unit study on ladybugs for a few days until your ladybugs arrive.
Why Build a Ladybug House?
I love to involve my kids in the garden as much as possible. If you have never thought about using your garden as an outdoor classroom, let me inspire you! This article over at Hip Homeschool Moms is a wonderful how-to guide about using your garden to teach botany and life cycle studies to your children.
Your garden doesn’t have to be big to be educational! For instance, identifying the parts of a plant, checking growth, looking for pests, and harvesting veggies all can be done with container gardens too!
If you are just about to start a garden, you will want to grab this free Garden Planner worksheet and Garden Notebook Pages to help make your garden classroom a full study.
One thing you have to think about if you have a garden is bugs! Good bugs and bad bugs. Talk with your kiddos about which bugs are good and which ones are bad for your garden. (To learn more about which bugs are good and which are bad, take a look at this article.)
Most people love ladybugs! These are some of the good bugs that we actually want to see in our yards and gardens.
Ladybugs are a type of beetle, and they eat all sorts of nasty pests in the garden – like aphids, scales, and mites. So we all get very excited when we see ladybugs in the garden! They are nature’s pest control, and they are great at it.
Inviting Ladybugs to Stay
With my children’s natural fascination with ladybugs, I thought it would be fun for us to build a ladybug house and order some ladybugs to release in the garden. (These are the ones I bought.)
You need to be careful when releasing ladybugs, though. You should release them at dawn or dusk. And if you want them to stay in your garden, you should build them a ladybug house. And, most importantly – wait to order your ladybugs until you see some pests for them to eat. If they have no natural food source, they will just leave.
How to Build a Ladybug House
Handymen around the world will cringe at my building techniques. (My husband literally couldn’t watch! Haha!) But the goal here was simplicity! And this is simple and easy. Oh! And cheap too. But if you want to, you can easily replace my hot glue gun technique with wood glue and some clamps.
Supplies
one 1″ x 4″ board cut into the following lengths:
- 2 pieces will need to be cut to 8″ long each
- 1 piece will need to be cut to 7 1/4″ long
- 2 pieces will need to be cut to 5″ long each
- IMPORTANT NOTE about boards: For those of us who are not carpenters, it’s important to know that a 1″ X 4″ board is actually (if you measure it) not exactly 1 inch by 4 inches. It’s actually 3/4″ X 3 1/2″. So if you ask for a 1X4 board at the hardware store and it’s not exactly that size when you measure it, no worries! As long as you cut your 1X4 board to the lengths I’ve specified, these instructions will work for you.
two or three pieces of bamboo (each several feet long)
- You’ll need to cut the bamboo pieces into lengths of 2″, 2 1/2″, and 3″
- NOTE about bamboo: You’ll need to use real bamboo–not the plastic stuff that’s sometimes used for crafts. Also, I used bamboo that is about 1/2″ up to 3/4″ in diameter or a little larger.
a handful of 2″ finishing nails
hammer
hot glue gun (with glue sticks)
ladybugs (either from your yard or from Amazon)
twine for hanging (optional)
Instructions
- Step 1: Gather your supplies.
- Step 2: Using your hot glue gun, glue the 8″ long pieces to the 7 1/4″ piece as shown in the photo below. Make sure the boards are lined up flush on top. (This means that the middle board on the bottom (which will eventually be the back of the ladybug house) will be shorter than the boards on the two sides. See the second and third pictures below.)
- Step 3: Now, glue the 5″ long pieces to the ends of your “box.” Look at the photos below to see how to place the end pieces before you glue them. Notice that, on one end, you’ll place the 5″ piece in the “cut-out” space. On the other end (See the second photo below.), the 5″ piece will sit on top of the board that’s on the bottom (that will eventually be the back of the ladybug house). By gluing these pieces this way, you’ll end up (See the third photo below.) with a longer overhang on the top and a shorter “step” on the bottom. It makes it look more like a cute little front porch!
- If you want to use the finishing nails to give your ladybug house a little added durability, now’s the time to do that.
- Step 4: Now all you have to do is glue in the pieces of bamboo!
Once you get all the bamboo pieces glued in place, you’re done! If you want to paint your ladybug house, you can do that now (or you can paint the pieces before you put the ladybug house together), but we thought ours was beautiful just like it is, so we left it with a more natural look.
If you want to glue a twine loop onto the back of your ladybug house for easy hanging, you can do that. We have a tree with a branch that’s low enough for us to reach, so we plan to perch our ladybug house there instead. We’ll nail it in place once we get it just where we want it.
- Step 5: Now you can either wait for the ladybugs in your yard to find their lovely new home, or you can release the ladybugs you ordered into their new home. PLEASE NOTE that, if you ordered ladybugs, you need to release them into their home at dusk. (All you have to do is open the little bag they came in and let them out right on top of the bamboo. They should go right in!)
If you want to have more ladybug fun, read a few books!
I decided to make this an informal unit study, so we went to the library and borrowed a bunch of books on ladybugs to read throughout the week while waiting for the ladybugs to arrive. Here are some of our favorites:
Ladybugs by Gail Gibbons : This had great information on the ladybug’s life cycle, anatomy, and their impact in gardens. My kids loved it!
The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle: Don’t leave out the little ones! If you have toddlers and preschoolers, this one is always fun. And it shows ladybugs eating aphids in the garden.
The Ladybug and Other Insects A First Discovery Book: This one we didn’t use, as I didn’t find it in our library, but it looks like it would be a great one for the older kids in the family! Especially if you have an insect lover.
I too was a homeschooling mom. My children are all grown and off on their own. Gardening for me was a way to help them understand nature & it worked out GREAT. Keep up the work you will be thankful you did. Carol
The bug use is absolutely cute. If one uses longer sticks they can be also serve as houses for wild bees.
But, when building this one should care for bamboo with a smooth hole without material in it and emerge all splinters from the ends. Insects have really sensitive wings and they can scratch them on the splinters and are not able to fly afterwards and will die =(
Where did you get the bamboo stalk sticks? I’m having a hard time finding those! Help! Thank you!
Here: https://amzn.to/2zfOags
You can also find them in the garden center at Home Depot! 😀
Your Lady Bugs look like Asian Lady Beetles and if so they do bite. The Lady bug I know and treasure in my garden is usually red with 7 spots (1 directly behind the head, 3 on each side)
That is exactly what I thought. They look orange and not like ladybugs I am used to seeing. I am curious who sold them to you. Those are Asian Lady Beetles!
Did you say you bought the lady bugs, and where? Or did they just come to the house naturally?
Amazon literally has everything! We’ve had great luck ordering Ladybugs and Caterpillers from here: https://amzn.to/2zobokR