Caterpillar watch!

During the half term something very special has happened- our butterflies have hatched from their cocoons! All five of our butterflies have come out and spent the first day drying out their wings and practising opening and closing them.

With my daughter's help we collected some flowers from the garden and placed them in the butterfly garden with some sugar water for the butterflies to eat.

They are very beautiful painted lady butterflies. Over the next day the butterflies got stronger and where able to fly around the butterfly garden and climb up to the top of the net. It was now time to let the butterflies go into the wild where they would have lots of space to fly around and find food by themselves.

With Ellie's help I opened the butterfly garden and carefully took the butterflies out, some flew away straight away and others flew onto the plants in the garden.

Caterpillar watch!

Our caterpillars have now shed their skin and have made their cocoons; we have removed them from their container and pinned the paper disk they are attached to inside the butterfly house. They now look like this.

They will stay inside for 7-14 days; whilst inside they will make an amazing transformation, actually liquefying and morphing into a butterfly.

I hope they stay inside over the half term so that the children can see them emerge as butterflies, I will keep you all updated in case they decide to emerge early.

Caterpillar watch!

This week we have seen some incredible changes happen to our caterpillars. We came back from the weekend break to find that they had grown to double in size!

On Thursday we saw our caterpillars make their way to the lid of their container and hang upside down from it- this means that they will shed their skin for one last time then create their cocoon. It is very important that we do not disturb the caterpillars during this important phase as it takes two days for the cocoon to harden and can break easily.

Once the cocoons have hardened we will transfer them into the butterfly garden.