Your Kids Will Love Raising Butterflies

Parents always want to give their children the best and coolest stuffs as gifts. As a parent you can teach your kids to rear butterflies, it's an amazing learning experience and they would want to do it over and over again. Raising butterflies can be a good hobby and gives you lot of fun. To raise the butterflies you will need a container and a good supply of the milkweed. These butterflies are really fascinating creatures; anyone including adults and children will enjoy watching them.

First you will need to get a caterpillar enclosure or you can purchase it if you don't have one. There is no need of any fancy enclosure but just a large container. We also need large-size plastic jars like the ones which you ffind in ware houses.

Butterflies need the milkweed compulsorily as they lay their eggs on this milkweed and also the caterpillars survive only on these milkweed. You can find milkweed plants in Meadows, on the highways or in any vacant place. To say there are large varieties of them but it would be better if you one of the tallest plant.

As these plants have large leaves it really helps them to lay their eggs underside the leaves. The laid eggs would be in white, tiny and in football shape same as the size of pin head. The eggs of butterfly have ridges on it and have a very distinctive shape. If you find any round or smooth eggs then you can easily say that those are not of butterflies.

Once you find these types of eggs on any of the leaf then you can cut that and then put it in a container. Lightly you need to mist them using spray bottles or with plant mister. Butterflies take about three days or less to hatch the eggs. So you need to wait for about two to three days and you can easily identify an egg which is almost hatch, that is there would a black spot over on almost hatch egg. This shows that caterpillar is developed inside the egg.

When these caterpillars hatch, they are in size of rice grain and not more than that. First these caterpillars eat the egg then slowly start eating that milkweed. The growth stage of caterpillar is two weeks and you need to clean the poop all the time and should supply Milkweed which is fresh. You should be very careful while cleaning those containers in that couple of days. The reason behind this is they are very small in size if you clean the containers carelessly then you may lose the eggs. As these caterpillars grow periodically, they try to crawl up over the sides of the containers and then try to molt their skin which enables them to grow. Any time you find any of the caterpillars stuck over the side of container don't bother disturbing it. When it is done with its molting then it will crawl back to milkweed and then start eating. When these caterpillars are small they only chew a leaf but as they start growing they can chew the entire plant in a day. So, it is better to see that there is a plenty of milkweed in the near surroundings. After one week they hang up in a J shape transforming itself in to a butterfly.

The whole lifecycle of a butterfly can be learnt with this and also it will be a wonderful learning experience for your kid to see how life evolves. buy Venus fly trap will teach your kids the concept of responsibility and taking care. Do not forget when the butterflies are ready to go, take the container outside and let them fly away.