I is for Insect Lore - Archive

I thought I'd posted these guys, literally years ago (these are from 2020), but they are all still in Picasa! So I'm posting this here, and then I'll combine the smaller numbers of shots from '23 and '25 in a single post later. This was from the London show, a couple of months before the Covid lockdown, which - time has, I think, shown - changed all our lives, more than we thought it was doing, at the time?

 

!!!! Effing annoyed when the images loaded in reverse, which seems to happen quite often these days and I don't know if I should be blaming Windows 11, Blogger/Google or Lenovo! But in fact, it makes sense to use the poorer images (which were going to be at the end) for the introduction to the company, then look at the figural products!

 

Insect Lore are a kind of 'early learning' schools-support / craft outfit, where you buy the kit, and/or any supporting products, then sent away for the Butterfly (or Ant?) eggs, so you can raise them to adulthood, learning the egg-pupae-lava-adult cycle along the way, and then release them, or do an ant-farm?

 

In 2020 they were raising Painted Lady's (or Ladies? No, some of them must be men!), which - while not native to the UK - are a regular summer visitor around the Southern and Eastern coasts, and with nowhere in the UK further than 51 miles from a beach, it means you can find them pretty-much anywhere in a good year, and also means that after any release, they can complete a typical life-cycle.

 

The kit here consists of a jar of feed, instruction booklet with details on how to raise them and find the food plants, along with a jar of the special feed etc . . . and the 'butterfly net' netting cage, in which to observe the metamorphosis of the chrysalis phase and emergence of the adults.

 

Blister carded life-cycle sets of rubber (modern PVC-substitute) polymer animals are also sold, and these may be bought in or commissioned specifically, I don't know, and am no expert on toy insects, but they look a little different, so may well be exclusive to Insect Lore?

 

Toobs of mixed Insects and Butterflies are also in the catalogue, along with all the expected stickers, booklets &etc. Again I don't know if these are unique to Insect Lore, or bought-in generics, they look more familiar, so may be the latter, however, they are both reasonable samples with about 18 Butterflies in the first image of this sequence - Insect Lore, box ticked!