Today we released our butterflies back into the wild. We received a box about three weeks ago with five very tiny caterpillars. Within a week they were huge and I couldn't look at them while I ate because it made me lose my appetite. Eliza on the other hand wanted the caterpillars right next to her plate so she could watch them crawl around. After about 10 days they crawled to the top of the bottle and made cocoons. This is when things got a little boring. It took about 10 days before they came out of their cocoons and started to fly all over their enclosure. The little book that came with the caterpillars told us to squirt sugared water into some flowers and place them in the enclosure. I found six flowers for $4 at Walmart. We used one flower for the butterflies. With the remaining flowers we put food coloring in some vases and watched the flowers change colors.
The blue worked really well, but the red never really seemed to take off.We had planned on releasing the butterflies earlier, but it has been too cold. Finally tonight it seemed to be the perfect temperature.
Forrest was the first one to put his hand in to catch a butterfly. As long as no one made sudden movement the butterfly was pretty content to sit on your hand.
Once the butterfly started to crawl around Forrest couldn't help but wiggle because it tickled. Which would make the butterfly fly away. Eliza acted like she wanted to try to hold one, but when it came time she backed away and said she was scared. She did like looking at them on other people's hand and when we were letting the last one go she finally worked up the nerve to touch it, but if flew away. Oh well maybe next year.
1 comment:
Thats really neat! I had no idea you could buy catepillars like that.
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