Butterfly Garden Review

Well, thanks to the numerous commercials for the Butterfly Garden, I did purchase one per the request of my oldest daughter.  We have gathered Monarch caterpillars in the past and watched them develop into butterflies.

These kits may be supplied differently.  My order came with the netted housing, a pipette, and a form to send in to order the butterflies. An additional $3 needed to order the butterflies.  I had the option to chose when I wanted the butterflies delivered.  It came with nice instructions going over a tentative timeline as to when we would have butterflies.

Here are the caterpillars when they arrived.  They were Painted Lady butterflies.  There were five caterpillars and the food is the light tan material on the bottom of the container.

Cocoons were on a piece of paper under he lid of the container.  I safety pinned it to the side of the netting.

Picture after all had hatched.  The red liquid worried me a bit.  I was afraid they were injured and bleeding at first.

Painted Lady on left side.

Layne taking out one of the butterflies to release.

Bye bye butterfly.

In summary, this is a nice learning project for the children.  They can participate at a fairly early age.  My 4-year-old kept up on development almost daily.  My 2-year-old only caught on to highlights, like growing caterpillars, chrysalis, hatching, and loved release the best.

There was a green pipette included with initial part of kit.  We never ended using it.  We placed flowers in the bottom of the netting for the butterflies as a first bit of food.  I don’t remember reading about a red liquid being released when the butterflies hatched.  I wish I was pre-warned of it happening.  I thought they had been damaged at first.  I washed the netting afterward by spraying water at it and I was never able to get all of the red discharge off.  TV ads mentioned a poster of the life cycle. My daughter had questioned me on it, but our kit did not include it.