I'm considering buying a kit to use with my 4 and 6 year old, but I thought I'd ask here first to hear about any good or bad experiences.

It would be a bummer if none of them made it to adulthood. Also, we live in a Northern climate, so I'm not sure if that influences when or which kind of butterfly we should order. A "painted lady" kit suggests we keep them in our home for their entire life cycle, but I know that monarch butterflies are common here, so we could certainly release those.

Thanks!

ZM

we did it and it was a blast. I completely recommend it.

It was amazing-- I want to do it again.

and the Monarchs did the rest. We have raised 36 butterflies; mostly Monarchs and a few Queens because they eat the same things. We also get swallowtails and Gulf Frittilaries (SP?). I have a butterfly garden in the backyard with nectar plants and host plants. I live in Central FL. As long as I keep the plants alive the butterflies do the rest. We made a butterfly box out of a cardboard box and some tule netting from the fabric store so my children could see them up close. The box only lasted a few months however because it is very humid here and the cardboard got soft and lost it's shape. You can raise more caterpillars in a butterfly enclosure than in the wild since the birds will eat them. We noticed the ones we left outside *disappeared* whereas the ones we raised survived. We had to go to the nursury twice to buy more butterfly weed plants however because raising that many means they eat a lot of leaves!!!

Sincerely,
Debra, homeschooling mom of 4 ages 10, 9, 7, and 45 mos

We do painted lady ones in the spring every year. We have about a 2/3 success rate. It's quite simple.
We also catch tadpoles in the spring and release the frog/toads when they are done evolving. It's one of my favourite things to have these two things sitting in the aquariums on our diningroom table. It feels all "homeschoolish" :lol And my kids think it is a blast.
I want to do praying mantis at some point too
I'm not sure really who is getting more out of this homeschooling gig - me or the kids. :lol
Karen

Oh - and we are in Canada - so the northern climes don't seem to be a problem.
You might want to check with some local gardening centres. One near us will sell monarch caterpillars and cocoons which are native to this area.

We haven't yet but we are planning to when we move to our farm. We'll have a butterfly garden, an outdoor one. We've learned for those ones you plant the passiflora and other plants that feed the caterpillars and they do the rest. Ours will be all based on luck. I like the idea of the box, I may suggest that to DH. We visited Butterfly World when we were in Florida and we were all just totally enamoured. It felt like an enchanted forest of fairies and we just then and there decided we MUST have a butterfly garden!

We raised painted lady butterflies from a kit, and it we definitely got butterflies! The garden kit that we had, though, had a really small area for the butterflies to be. Once they were out of their chrysalises, we saw that they really couldn't fly much at all. That didn't seem so good for butterflies, so we released them pretty quickly (we live in a northern climate, too, but the kit we had said it was okay to release them). If we were going to do it again, we would definitely get a larger net-type thing for the butterflies so that we could keep them and watch them longer.