About a month ago I bought a package for raising butterflies. The plastic, netted little butterfly house comes in the mail along with a certificate you redeem when you're ready to receive brand new little butteryfly larva in the mail. Ours came around January 20, just cute teeny tiny little larva, or caterpillars. We estimated they hatched about 2 or 3 days before getting to our house.
They spent the next ten days eating and GROWING!!! They lived in the container they were sent in because all their food was in there, as well as the fact that we didn't want to introduce our bacteria into their habitat.
We observed their growth, and documented how many days they remained caterpillars before climbing to the top of the container to make cocoons. Oh how delighted the kids were when suddenly, one morning, one caterpillar was hanging from the top! Within hours all 4 were hanging and making cocoons. They stayed there another ten days or so until out came four beautiful Painted Lady butterflies.
They've been living in that big plastic butterfly garden that came with the original order. I put a fresh slice of orange for them to eat from every few days. They're so pretty to look at and fun to observe. Since the outside temps are too cold to release them, they'll live out their life cycle in our house. If we wanted to, we could have put nettle or thistle leaves to make a favorable environment for their eggs to hatch and continue the life cycle. I'm not really up for that, so we'll just let them live out their lives and call it at that. Our science curriculum had a great set of lab pages for this unit, so my kids got to observe and record all stages.
in the picture above you can see the four cocoons
in the picture above the adult butterflies are having some orange juice
in the picture above, an aerial shot of the Painted Ladies
I ordered ours from Insect Lore
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