“Mama, when are my caterpillars going to be here?” Jasper, our almost 5 year old, asks sweetly. This boy, who has been counting down the days to his birthday for the last 2 months, has been temporarily distracted by the impending arrival of caterpillars for our butterfly house.
As an early birthday gift, the boys’ Nana (great-grandmother) sent an Insect Lore butterfly habitat kit, complete with a coupon to purchase caterpillars. Now, our caterpillars had finally arrived. *As an Amazon affiliate we may earn from qualifying purchases made via links in this post*
The caterpillars quadruple their size over 7-10 days, constantly eating and leaving silky webs all across their temporary plastic-cup home. The boys checked on the caterpillars everyday, sometimes leaving the cup in the middle of our dining room table so they could keep an eye on them.
Eventually, each caterpillars makes its way to the lid of the cup and morphs into a chysalis, hanging precariously by the thinnest, hardened silken threads. This is the trickiest point… Once they have all hardened, you have to carefully remove the lid, turn it sideways and position it into a holder inside the butterfly house. Then, leave them be for another week. (Note: make sure you put the habitat in a location not accessible to cats…)
When a chrysalis starts to darken, don’t take your eyes off of it!! We had the butterfly house right in front of us during lunch and yet we managed to miss TWO of the fresh butterflies emerging. It felt like a magic trick – now you don’t see it, now you do! They are so fast. So fast, in fact, that we didn’t actually see any of them come out, despite our efforts of observation.
After the butterflies emerge, they need to be fed. We put over-ripe strawberries and other fruit on a tupperware lid inside the butterfly house. Emerson, especially, loved to watch the butterflies exercising their wings and flitting around the habitat.
After they all “hatched” and had time to recover, we knew it was time to set them free. It was bittersweet to let them go, after having observed and cared for these creatures for a couple of weeks. At first when we opened the house outside, nothing happened. Then Jasper carefully reached in and a butterfly walked onto his hand. Lifted out of the net, it paused for a moment, extended its wings, then soared into freedom. Jasper scooped up another one, then Bodie, and finally all 5 of our beauties were gone, landing here and there around our yard before taking to the skies again.
One of the best things is that you can re-use the habitat, simply purchasing caterpillars whenever you want.
This wasn’t necessarily a present that I would have thought to get for the kids, but they were surprisingly engaged the whole time. And, now, they are just that much more aware of the mysteries of nature. Thanks Nana!!
