Butterfly Rescue (Siobhan)

 ~Butterflies and Praying Mantises~

One of our favorite science projects each year is our painted lady butterfly hatching. We buy caterpillars from Insect Lore and watch them turn into butterflies.

We've always had great success with hatching our butterflies, but this time around we had one butterfly which was born with a broken wing. Shaila is an avid animal lover, and she immediately claimed it and took care of it. She named it 'Mephibosheth' (after Jonathan's lame son that King David took in.) We set all of the other butterflies free after a few days, but Shaila kept Mephibosheth because she knew he wouldn't do well in the wild. She fed him sugar water and tamed him so that she could walk around the house with him on her finger. When he had lived a nice long life, she released him into our flowerbed out front.

We also bought a praying mantis egg sack. We had almost given up on it hatching, and we woke up to dozens of little praying mantises crawling out of their container!

Shaila and Ethan let them free by our garden so they could eat all our pests 😉

Click here to see our other butterfly hatching posts!

Painted Lady Butterflies

~Butterflies~

Most of you probably know that we have loved getting caterpillars from Insect Lore and watching them hatch into butterflies. I didn't get a lot of pictures from this round of butterflies, because we let them go earlier than we usually do and they were very fast fliers! If you want to see our previous butterfly posts click here.

Our first butterfly hatched! The rest are in chrysalises.

We fed them sugar water that we put on paper towels as well as some freshly sliced oranges.

We set them free after a few days.

If you look closely in the above picture, you can see the butterfly's proboscis rolled up underneath its head. 

Thank you Insect Lore!

Praying Mantises Galore... By: Stella

We recently had an amazing experience! We got to watch a whole egg sack of at least 50 baby praying mantises hatch :D They crawled out of the egg sack and we all checked on them in awe over the morning; they literally must have been growing before our eyes! In the evening they were WAYYY darker and bigger than in the morning! (Maybe it was all those flightless fruit flies and bugs and spiders that we were feeding them :-) )
They can eat anything that is smaller than themselves. When they get bigger they can even eat hummingbirds! (No way, I couldn't handle feeding them that either :-( )
We hope that you enjoy these pictures, taken about 5 minutes after they had hatched and while they were hatching. ;-)

 

Mom was the only one who would brave sticking her hand into the icky, slimy mass of blue ooze that contained the food for our hungry little mantises. (Probably because she grew up with brothers with snakes and other slimy critters ;) ) 

 
Nobody can keep a straight face on when we ask them for 'flightless fruit flies'. :P They always start cracking up, many clearing their throats and asking Dad to repeat it, hoping he'll say something like 'fruitless flight [or fright] flies' :) He's a good sport ;-)

Okay, so I HAVE to end this post with the above pictures! They are so cute ;-) Tert said that the first picture is one of a praying mantis with 'someone touching it'! I enlarged the 'someone touching it' so you can see it better ;-)
I don't know what it is about 4 year old's pictures... :-)
By: Stella
Age: 12
Praying Mantises Galore 

Butterfly Fun Again By: Stella

So the painted lady butterflies that we set free just a couple weeks ago...WERE JUST THE BEGINNING!!!! They laid eggs that hatched! We were surprised and we were excited but didn't count on the tiny little specks in the plastic container that we set up for them making it. We hurried to buy some Malva to feed the larvae with. We put in the leaves and we were surprised at how quickly they ate it. But that was nothing compared to what they do now... We have already put in four or five leaves today which they shriveled down to nothingness! They are getting huge! I got pictures of what they were the day they hatched... and what they are like now! See the difference?!

You can BARELY see the caterpillars here!! Now check out the pic. below...





AMAZING!!!!

We'll put more pictures up later!!! :)

By: Stella

Butterfly Fun By: Stella

Hi All!
I wrote a three paragraph report on butterflies which I put on the blog below. I also wanted to share some pics. with you of the butterflies that we got from Insect Lore! We let them go today, and we had lots of fun! Rather than telling you about it, here are some pictures! I grabbed the camera and got some GREAT shots!! (If I may say so myself!) :P LOL!



Admiring the Butterfly





Getting a Closer Look...



Beautiful!!!





Admiring the Butterflies....




WHOA!!

Flutter By Butterfly!!!



Say cheese butterfly!!



Smile!!!

Hope you enjoyed the pictures!!

By: Stella