Raising Butterflies

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Inspired to raise a few butterflies has led us to a new summer tradition and garden project, one butterfly at a time!

A Girl and Her Butterflies

Ila Dawn loves butterflies. She has lots of butterfly dresses, bags, hair clips, amongst many other things. Last summer, a local lady who raises monarchs in her garden did a butterfly release at a local historical schoolhouse turned community building. So of course we had to go. I mean the local quilting ladies have a shop set up and all the small town events happen in this rock building that once educated them all. So an excuse to go shop for handmade quilts and release butterflies at the same time was a Saturday well spent for my little lady and I. What’s more small-town-country-living-could-be-a-hallmark-movie than that?

This summer I decided to join in on the fun and we would raise our own. Even though I knew absolutely nothing. But we were reccomended a butterfly kit to get started and it turns out it was the same that the local school district my mom works at buys for their students. So I ordered away.

Since we did this the beginner way, we have lots of room to grow and improve. I’ve seen countless articles on pinterest and blogs teaching how to collect caterpillars from the garden, create your own habitat and release them back into the garden. I loved this article from My Life Abundant and will go off this once we can get milkweed and other food planted, and become a bit more self sufficient for catching our own caterpillars and growing our own butterfly food. But we do not have milkweed or any “butterfly food” in our garden. Now that I’ve read up and somehwhat know about creating butterfly gardens, this is on our project list! How I would love to go about it this way. So our next steps include:

• Plant native milkweed (for monarchs) and more daisies, purple coneflower, black eyed susans, and hollyhocks (for painted lady)
• Build a better and larger butterfly habitat and safe outdoor garden for collecting caterpillars and releasing butterflies (maybe even a dedicated beautiful fenced butterfly flower garden?! I dream!)
• Read up as much as we can about the process, what to feed, and host plants

I also have a 4 year old doing this project with me and that takes most of the attention, so we will grow our butterfly raising operations as we get more familiar and this little ladies attention span can handle it.

Raising Painted Lady Butterflies

For this year, we ordered this Painted Lady kit off of InsectLore. This was pretty simple.

We received the habitat and the cup of caterpillars. The caterpillars have all the food in the cup that they need and only need a safe place to sit. After a few days, they will climb to the top of the cup and form a “J” shape to begin forming their chrysalis, which will harden.

We had 1 caterpillar not make it even this far. Another one formed its chrysalis on the floor of the cup and was wiggling when we removed the lid, so I placed it in the habitat but it never developed into a butterfly and passed.

Once the chrysalis was formed, we took the lid of the cup that they hung from off (very carefully, the butterflies wiggled inside a lot during this process) and placed it in this plastic tray from the kit that holds it up vertically and then into the mesh habitat.

After 7-10 days, we woke up to 1 butterfly flying around the habitat. By the end of the day, the other 2 had hatched. What an exciting day! Once all hatched (?) we placed a tray with a sponge in for the butterflies and I made up sugar nectar to feed them with. This was 1/4 cup sugar to 1 cup water and I let it cool.

Now I didn’t realize we probably should have let them go the day they hatched, but we kept them for a day for Ila Dawn to watch. Then we released them in the garden!

Letting Painted Lady Butterflies Go In The Garden Video

In addition to our butterfly garden project, i’d like to do a few things different:

• try monarchs for our next butterfly raising! I like painted lady butterflies too, I just think this could be fun.
• try feeding fruit instead of nectar

Overall, the differences just come down to trying different ways of raising them and seeing what we like and what works well with keeping this tradition every summer.