Delia's Butterfly Garden

About a month ago a friend from church gave me a Live Butterfly Garden. Her girls had already done it and so she passed it on to me. All we had to do was mail $3.00 with the coupon and wait for our caterpillars to arrive.

A few weeks later they arrived. Delia and I opened the box and inside was a small container with 5 caterpillars. The bottom of the container was covered in food which they ate and ate and ate. If you've ever read, The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle then you would understand just how hungry they can be and if you haven't read it......then you should. :)

After a few days four of the caterpillars crawled to the top of the container and hung upside down. The strange thing is that one moment I'd look and they'd look like a caterpillar still and the next time I looked they'd be in their coccoons. It seemed like the process of going from caterpillar to coccoon happened so quickly but in reality it probably took the whole day. I was just busy and didn't notice. So while the four coccoons were hanging there the other caterpillar kept disturbing them. And the coccoons would shake violently in an attempt to scare the "predator" away. The lone caterpillar was not deterred and continued "bugging" the coccoons until the next day when he finally decided it was time to change too.

Here is the 5th caterpillar hanging upside down ready to become a cocoon.

The following day we (and by we I mean Jake) took the lid off of the container and put the paper they were hanging on into the butterfly habitat. And that is where they sat for about a week.


Then one day while I was making lunch I glanced at the cage and there were four butterflies hanging onto the inside of the cage. I couldn't believe it had happened so quickly and that I didn't even get to see one "hatch". The next day the fifth butterfly emerged....and of course we missed this one "hatch" too.

The directions say to decorate the bottom of the cage with flowers and then drip a mixture of water and sugar onto the flowers. We didn't have any flowers so we used paper towels wadded up and saturated with the mixture instead. We also had some watermelon that we put in there. It was fun watching them drink. I've never seen a butterfly drink before. It was very interesting to say the least.

Here is Delia making their drink.

A few days later we decided it was time to set them free. We went outside to the big bushes near our apartment and Jake started taking them out one by one. The first one stayed on his hand long enough to get a few pictures. The rest flew away as soon as they could. The last one however flew to the bush and sat there and let me take pictures of it before it flew away like the others.

We enjoyed our little Butterfly Garden. Delia had a lot of fun watching them change. She even named them......but their names changed on an hourly basis. So they were very hard to keep track of. Bood, Pick, Trick, Heed, and Hode are some of the names I remember.

Click below for more pictures of Delia's Butterfly Garden.

Delia's Butterfly Garden