'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home.
'Your house is on fire and your children all gone.'
HE BLOWS
Few insects have such a hold on our affection as the ladybird.
There are versions of that rhyme in Switzerland, France and Sweden.
And look at all these things -
pyjama cases, books, hats, cloths, all kinds of things.
This... MUSIC ..is a radio from Hong Kong.
Shampoo from Norway.
A little clockwork toy from Japan.
This rather charming box from China.
Matches from Poland, chocolates from Germany - an enormous number of things.
But what about the REAL ladybird?
Ladybirds are found from the Arctic to the Tropics,
from America through Europe and Asia to Africa and Australia.
Those spotty replicas are based on the "7-spot ladybird", the most familiar of our British species.
This is another common one, the "2-spot".
There are at least 2 dozen types in Britain, some with red spots.
This one has rings round its spots.
Some have as many as 18 spots,
or even 22.
And some have no spots at all.
Whatever their pattern and colour,
these gaudy beetles have shared our fields and hedgerows for centuries,
holding a special place in folklore.
The "lady" of the name ladybird is said to be the Virgin Mary -
shown in mediaeval paintings wearing a cloak of red -
and the seven spots symbolise the seven sorrows or joys of the Virgin.
The ladybird's red cloak serves as a warning.
If disturbed, ladybirds discharge bitter yellow fluid from the knees,
so it's unpleasant to eat and predators avoid it.
Ladybirds appear in the spring.
They hibernate through the winter,
in clusters concealed in leaves or at the base of clumps of grass.
These ladybirds will have hatched towards the end of the summer,
so are already several months old.
As the air warms, they crawl upwards into the green of the new year's growth.
One of the ladybird's first acts is to seek out a mate.
Male and female ladybirds look more or less identical, except, perhaps, to another ladybird.
The slight differences in colour
are the result of age, or just natural variation.
Mating lasts for two hours or more.
A female may mate as many as 20 times,
though one mating is sufficient for several batches of eggs.
Adults that have over-wintered seldom survive beyond mid-summer,
but, before that, the female lays her eggs.
She positions them on the leaves in neat batches of a few dozen.
Most females lay 200-300, but some may lay over a thousand.
Contrary to folk tales that describe ladybirds as good mothers,
she takes no further interest in her eggs once they are laid.
After about a week, depending on temperature, the eggs begin to darken.
New life stirs within the shell.
These alien creatures, so different from the adult, are ladybird larvae.
They remain clustered on the eggs until their skins darken and harden.
Then, after a meal of their own eggshell,
they set off into the world in search of prey.
Just along the stem on these same nettles,
greenfly are bringing their young into the world - upside down.
To a tiny creature like this, the hairs on a nettle stem must be real obstacles -
and they're poisonous, too!
But a REAL danger is approaching.
Ladybird larvae are voracious predators, and aphids are their favourite prey.
The aphid has little defence other than to kick and struggle.
That's seldom effective against any but the smallest ladybird larva.
A takeaway meal for an infant ladybird.
If aphids are in short supply,
the larvae themselves may be at risk.
This huge monster is another ladybird larva.
Well-grown larvae do devour their own kind, but this is exceptional.
The numbers of aphids increase as the season advances,
till there are aphids and ladybirds everywhere that food can be found.
Fields of young corn yield an abundance of shoots
for aphids to pierce and suck.
Given time, many of these would be eaten by ladybirds,
but the farmer can't afford to wait.
He sprays the crop with insecticide, so killing not just the aphids, but the ladybirds and their larvae.
But, fortunately for the ladybirds, it's not always like that.
In your own garden, you can leave the nettles unsprayed.
For 3 to 6 weeks, the larvae feed and grow.
Then, after a final moult, they turn into pupae.
A week or two later, the pupa begins to hatch.
It's quite normal for ladybirds to hatch out looking like this.
Only after several minutes do the spots gradually appear.
At the same time, the wings expand and harden.
When dry, they will be folded up beneath these spotty wing-cases.
It now looks more like a ladybird.
But it may be weeks before it's the familiar pillar-box red.
Long before that, it's hard at work eating aphids.
One ladybird may eat as many as a hundred aphids a day,
several thousand in a lifetime.
So effective are they as predators
that in California they're used to control insects in orchards.
You can buy them for your garden.
Ten dollars will buy half a pint of ladybirds - about 5,000.
Ladybirds aren't the only creatures that take an interest in aphids.
Ants do as well, but in their case the relationship is mutually beneficial.
As the aphids feed, they secrete a sugary liquid from their rear end,
which the ants seek out and drink.
In return for the nectar, the ants defend the aphids against predators.
But how do they manage with a ladybird?
The ladybird's hard, slippery wing-cases stop the ants getting a grip,
and, by "rocking and rolling", it shields its vulnerable underside.
In years when aphids do well, ladybird numbers also build up enormously.
The long, hot summer of '76 was a very good year for ladybirds,
but the popular press thought this was a major threat to humanity!
CLATTER OF TYPEWRITER
Ladybirds are really quite harmless.
But they do tickle, and they may exude an irritant fluid if you squash them.
1976 WAS exceptional. Usually, ladybirds get a better press.
Just off one of those beaches is the Eastbourne Butterfly Centre,
a lushly-planted greenhouse alight with tropical butterflies.
One spring, they had a problem.
To show the butterflies off to best advantage, they grow flowering plants like this hibiscus.
At the start of the season, the shoots became infested with aphids.
They could have been eliminated by insecticides, but that would also have killed the butterflies.
So they appealed on local radio for people to bring them ladybirds.
And bring them they did, in hundreds.
The ladybirds soon set to work and demolished the aphids.
So the situation was saved.
An enclosed space like a greenhouse is ideal for using ladybirds to control pests.
The problem is getting enough ladybirds.
In America, they collect them from mass hibernation sites,
but British ones don't get together in such large numbers.
And once the aphids are gone,
the ladybirds tend to fly off somewhere else. That's what those clouds of ladybirds did in 1976.
Most ladybirds are carniverous,
but a few are vegetarian.
This "22-spot" one grazes on fungi and thin layers of mildew
that may coat the surface of leaves.
It's not only the adults that eat mildew. Larvae do as well.
You often find 22-spots in the garden, they like long grass.
Most ladybirds have a preferred habitat.
Two British species like heathland.
This one is associated with heather.
Called the "hieroglyphic ladybird", it comes in orange and black forms.
Others like conifers.
At least six kinds frequent pines, some even having a preference for a particular level in the tree,
though you may see them elsewhere.
This is the "striped ladybird".
Like all conifer ladybirds, it's carniverous,
and it gets plenty of moisture from its food, but it's not averse to a drop of rain or dew.
Most conifer ladybirds, like this "cream-streaked ladybird", are quite conspicuous,
so long as they move about on green pine needles.
Like their gaudier cousins', their colours tell predators that they are distasteful.
But, at rest within the pine buds, the same colours camouflage them.
Another kind found on conifers is the "eyed ladybird".
This is perhaps the most handsome British ladybird, and the largest.
Like all ladybirds, it can do something rather surprising.
Yes, ladybirds CAN fly - seen here in slow motion.
Normally, their wings are folded away out of sight,
but they are strong fliers when the need arises, as when food is scarce.
They can easily go 80 kilometres - as far as from London to Brighton.
Some species of ladybird all look very much the same.
Others vary tremendously -
none more than the "2-spot".
The typical form looks like this:
red, with two black spots.
But, sometimes, the spots are linked.
Or there may be extra small spots.
When there are more spots,
they may fuse to give a range of patterns.
Towards the end of the spectrum, they become BLACK, with RED spots.
ALL these are 2-spot ladybirds.
They could all have come from the same batch of eggs.
CHURCH BELLS RING
The frequency of the different patterns varies from one part of the country to another.
Here, in East Anglia, the black form is hardly ever seen.
Almost all are the typical, "proper", red with two black spots.
In other places, the black forms are much commoner -
up to 90% of the population in parts of Scotland,
and here, in northern England.
It WAS thought this might be linked to pollution,
that black ladybirds might be better camouflaged in grimy industrial landscapes.
But black forms predominate in some UN-polluted regions.
And black ladybirds were around BEFORE the Industrial Revolution.
It seems the link is rather with the amount of sunlight.
The north tends to be cloudier and cooler, and black ladybirds absorb heat better than red ones.
So black ladybirds can get off to an earlier start in the morning...or the spring.
But that's not the whole story. Some female ladybirds PREFER black males.
This preference is inherited,
so, in places where it's advantageous to be black, red males have a hard time.
The females kick them off or try to run away.
Ladybirds have few natural enemies.
Warning colours and unpleasant taste deter larger predators,
and their hard wing-cases armour them against smaller ones.
But they ARE vulnerable to THIS. A tiny parasitic wasp.
The wasp stalks the ladybird...
But it's not trying to sting it. The reality is much more horrifying.
That long spike on the wasp's tail is used for laying eggs.
It's trying to place an egg within the living tissues of the ladybird.
It probes for a weak spot in the ladybird's armour.
There! The egg is laid.
The wasp grub hatches out and consumes the ladybird from within.
Then, when it's ready to pupate, it eats its way out of the still-living ladybird.
It spins a silken cocoon, anchoring the ladybird down.
In this way, it gains protection from the unfortunate ladybird's warning colouration.
Autumn.
With the turning of the season,
ladybirds seek out sheltered refuges for hibernation.
7-spots descend to the undergowth.
Other ladybirds conceal themselves in the bark of trees, in crevices in rocks,
and, sometimes, in a more domestic setting.
These are 2-spot ladybirds.
You often find clusters of them indoors.
To them, this window frame must seem like just another rock,
or a particularly good crack in a tree trunk.
Here, they will be sheltered from the worst of the winter,
till the new year again brings the return of the ladybird.
Subtitles by Chas Donaldson BBC Scotland 1987
E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk