The butterflies...

Have you seen those infomercials for "Butterfly gardens"? We thought Daniel would enjoy watching the progression from caterpillar to beautiful butterfly so we ordered the kit. We bought ours from Insectlore, but I am sure that there are probably other sources out there as well! You get a jar with caterpillars and a mesh container. They guarantee that you will get at least 3 butterflies.

There are 5 tiny caterpillars in a jar that has some kind of food on the bottom. It took about 13 days from the day that we got them until they were all formed into chrysalids (cocoons). Then we transferred them into the "butterfly garden". Once in the butterfly garden, it took about another 8-10 days for all of the butterflies to emerge! Once they emerged from the chrysalids, we put fresh cut oranges and sugar water in the bottom. We watched them for a few days and then released them in our front yard. I wondered how Daniel would react to releasing them, but he understood that we had to release them for them to live! I don't have the heart to tell him that the lifespan of a butterfly is only 2-4 weeks!

Although slow at times, it was an interesting observation! As with life, there are times where you see lots of activity and other times where it just seems like nothing is happening. So, there were a few times where he lost interest since you couldn't see anything changing (heck..I even lost interest after awhile). But there were other times that he was very excited about the changes! I do think that the commercial is a little misleading because it says "in just 10 days you will have beautiful butterlies". The entire process for us was about 25 days. You can see from the pictures that the caterpillars to grow pretty fast and it does get messy in that cup by the end. The weather needs to be at least 55 degrees to release them and if you have a garden or flowers, they seem to hang around for awhile- at least ours have! Definitely something I would do again though!

He looked through the catalog and saw other things that they offered. I quickly nixed the frog...I'm not up for that one yet! We might do the ladybugs if we do this again...although I wonder what my Mom would think of that as she once had a ladybug infestation that she wasn't too thrilled about!