Butterflies in your garden

Imagine beautiful multi-colored butterflies flitting in your garden; kids would want to spend time over there, and friends would drop in more often to see the garden that seems to attract such beautiful creatures. Everybody would love to have more butterflies in their garden, but it is hardly the easiest thing to do. You can’t just catch butterflies and release them in your gardens. In addition, just having flowers in your garden can’t help you many times – it’s just not necessary that this will ensure that you have lots of butterflies. So how do you do it ?
Well, here’s a site that should help you. Take a look at the Butterfly Farm Web Site (link)
Some extracts from the website:
- The good news is that it is very easy to attract butterflies to your own backyard, no matter how small or urban, and you can help to preserve these most brilliant and fascinating creatures.
- Raising butterflies: All about the caterpillars that will eventually become butterflies
- There are four stages to a butterfly’s life, and each stage is radically different from the others.
Briefly, a butterfly starts as an egg. After about 5 to 10 days the egg hatches and a tiny caterpillar (larvae) emerges.
The caterpillar starts to eat and will shed it’s skin 4 to 6 times as it gets bigger and bigger.
After about 2 to 4 weeks the caterpillar will be full grown and transforms itself into a chrysalis/pupa.
What happens next is most amazing as inside the pupal case the caterpillars body breaks down into a kind of soup from which grows the adult structure of the butterfly! This stage can take between 10 to 15 days. Finally, the adult butterfly emerges from the chrysalis.