None caught my attention more than the idea of raising butterflies. I tried unsuccessfully to get my director to order some in and while each year I worked in the field I thought "I should really just do it on my own, and share it with the kids" I never got to it. When we started home schooling I re-visited the butterfly idea but again, I never got around to it.
Then a few months ago one of the parents in the home schooling group asked if anyone would be interested in going in on a set of butterfly larvae from Boreal. She received a huge positive response and I think there were a couple sets of 80 ordered. Each family got to take home 10 Painted Lady Butterfly larvae in little cups with food.
Unfortunately for the blog, the delivery date happened the same week we moved. So I didn't get to picture taking of the process until they were in the chrysalis stage. Totally missed the caterpillars, and I regret it. When they arrived they were tiny wee things, just over 1cm in length and no bigger around than fingering weight yarn. Within a week they were big fat things, about 4cm in length and thicker than most bulky weight yarns (but not so big as pencil roving).
Sadly, one of our caterpillars died before he could make a chrysalis. The kids were sort of bummed about that, but it led to a few good chats about life cycles.
The instructions told us we could put gauze or cheesecloth under the lids of the little cups for the caterpillars to attach their chrysalis to, and while most of ours did that, they then promptly fell off once they were totally encased. I taped a strip of gauze to the side of the (empty) fish tank that would be their home and carefully picked up each one and hooked it on to the gauze just like the video showed.
I was not expecting their little bums to start wiggling frantically as I moved them, a surprise that nearly had me dropping them.
Surprise wiggles aside, I did successfully get them situated in the tank and the waiting began
Because that's how life works...most of them emerged while we were out of the house. We came back from Cam's band class to discover we had 5 butterflies hanging out in the tank
The streaks of red are meconium
The instructions told us to make a sugar water solution (5 tbsps sugar to one cup water) and soak cotton balls in it, then put the cotton balls in the habitat for the butterflies to eat from. I hadn't gotten around to buying cotton balls. I thought I had plain cotton make-up pads, but couldn't find those anywhere. I did have something made of clean cotton I could use, and it worked rather well...
Heh. If you can't quite figure out what those are, picture them with a string attached.
The next morning the kids and I are hanging out eating breakfast and Grace exclaims that there are more butterflies in the tank. I do a head count and sure enough, there are two more. We blink and a third has emerged and is shaking out his/her wings. We turn our attention to the last chrysalis, and it is definitely wiggling. As we watch the butterfly's head pokes out and then whoosh! It's out! It happened so quickly I didn't have time to grab the camera. I would have loved to have gotten video of it.
On Saturday our butterflies entered what is now referred to as their "experimental college days". They discovered their mating drive and man alive did they ever act on it. We had been discussing when we were going to set them free, and decided that since they had been mating we should probably get to it sooner rather than later...we wanted them to be able to lay their eggs. Since we were going out to my parents place on Sunday for Father's day, and they have a lovely garden, we opted to release them there.
I took the screen off and we waited for them to take flight. They left in pairs mostly, except the last two. One took off and the last one had to be encouraged to move on (I took a stick and let him climb on, then transferred him into the garden. He did fly off to rest elsewhere though, so I think he's fine).
All in all, it was a great experience. I look forward to next year :)
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