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SCIENCE ALIVE! - Pretty Fly For a Butterfly

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Featuring our Butterfly Life Cycle kit.

Show Transcript

Welcome back to SCIENCE ALIVE! My name is Mercedes, and today's session is titled "Pretty Fly for a Butterfly". We'll be featuring our Butterfly Life Cycle kit. Today, Miss Peggy here will be sharing our information. Thank you, Mercedes. We have, in our Butterfly kit, a number of items that we want you to be familiar with. One is the Butterfly Life Cycle poster. And along with the poster that shows the life cycle, we have models; the butterfly egg, the caterpillar or larvae, the pupa or Chrysalis, and then of course the butterfly. We also have 30 sheets of printable reproducible material and in addition to the printable material we have a read-aloud book on butterflies and also a quick reference pamphlet on the butterflies of Central Texas. With a big fold-out pamphlet and it's also double-sided. You can find these at any HEB. And lastly, we have a brochure or a fold-out brochure on Monarch butterflies and protecting monarch butterflies also double-sided. Shows the migration and a lot of good information about monarchs. And I see another one, the same thing with lots more other information on them. Yes. Monarchs and milk-weeds So, information about what the Monarchs feed on, what their food source is, and some good information again on the life cycle. Mercedes, is there something in this curriculum that you will be demonstrating today? There is actually. So, if you flip to the little tab I have marked right there. Okay. It will show a little template on how to make a butterfly box. Butterfly houses or butterfly boxes make great additions to your yard or garden not only to attract butterflies but also for raising them from the caterpillar stage. I'm going to pull out some materials just to show you a little simple way to create a box. Materials that Mercedes has for this project are a cardboard box. It's just like a normal shipping box I had already cut off the little flaps. A cutting tool, netting, I don't have netting right now, but you can use cellophane or plastic wrap but you would have to make sure you poke holes in the cellophane. You can buy any netting at a fabric store. It's fairly cheap. Yeah, and of course, you need tape. Yes, you need sticks, leaves from outside. Yes, the sticks and the leaves so the butterflies and caterpillars or whatever you have in here can have somewhere to crawl onto. Finally, you have a ruler, pen, pencil or marker. So, I use the ruler to cut out a little guide. I used about an inch from the edge. A mark on the other side and then this is the part where I will be cutting out. On the top I also had made a guide right here. This will be our little hand hole so we can stick food, water and other resources in there for the butterfly. Like a little door? Um-hmmm. Okay. I'm going to just cut this open really quick just to show you what it would look like. It becomes a little door flap right here at the top. Nicely done. Now you have another viewing window. This would be the main and these are the sides. I'm going to make one of these. So, for something simple like this, would really just be for the caterpillar larvae, and if you don't want to keep them confined in the little tiny culture cup that you have, you can always open the cup and they can go exploring and then go back into the cup for their food. Right, they have a bigger habitat. so again, this would be covered with the cellophane or the netting as well as the sides, and then you have your little opening right here we can put down their food and their water. So, I have something that I made over the weekend. This would be a temporary Butterfly House that you would put outside. This one is also made out of cardboard but I wouldn't leave it out overnight, just in case it rains. You see it have plastic surrounding the viewing windows and I have punched holes in them. I also painted it or tried to paint it brightly-colored I am assuming that butterflies are attracted to bright colors. I think red, yellows, purples, and pinks. I do have a little opening right here. The purpose of having a Butterfly House in your yard or garden is to provide shelter from the elements in a convenient area as well as a place to hide from predators. This would be the food dish and water dish so since this would be an outside thing, people would suggest as a butterfly feeder some put fruit down. Their attracted to the nectar and sweet things in the, in the fruit like sugar. For water-wise, you would use a very very shallow dish You can put little stones in there so they can perch on the stones and drink the water from there as well. If I were a butterfly, I wouldn't mind living in there. You know, we were talking about crystalis in here, are butterfly eggs big enough for us to see with our eyes? And where do they lay their eggs? They actually are visible. Sometimes, the sizes vary between the species. I believe they can be about an eighth of an inch, but that also varies. They can be as small as a ballpoint pen or even smaller. The females that usually lay their eggs on their host plants. Host plants are the plants that the species of butterflies prefer. For example, black swallowtails, they prefer plants from the carrot family. So, of course the carrots, fennel, dill, or parsley. And monarch butterflies are attracted to plants in the milkweed family. So, the female butterflies will usually lay their eggs on the leaves of those host plants. The caterpillars would form their chrysalis or the pupae either on the top of the Butterfly House or on anything that you have laying around for a perch, that's why I have this stick in here. Now, Mercedes, since we don't provide live caterpillars or a chrysalis, where can teachers get chrysalis that they can actually have the butterfly....er, the caterpillar turn into a butterfly through that metamorphosis? Right, so I believe Ward's Science carry some, they carry the Painted Ladies. They carry the eggs and the larvae. Carolina Biological also provides pupae and larvae. They have a wider variety. They have silkworms, hornworms, they also have Painted Ladies. And I believe they do carry the Luna Moth cocoons as well. Silkworm and hornworm will grow into moths, not butterflies. But they also pollinate as well. Moths are good sometimes. We're going to go ahead and go into a little question time. It really just depends on the different types of butterflies. So, if you were to get our Butterfly Life Cycle kit, you can go into our pamphlets and inside it tells you how big they grow. So, for example, a monarch butterfly, the wingspan can reach 3 and 1/2 inches to 4 inches. Or the dog-faced butterfly, their wingspan can reach two to three inches in length. So, it all just depends on what type of butterfly it is. They like to eat leaves, so if you were having a monarch butterfly caterpillar, they would eat the milkweed leaves. If you were having a swallowtail caterpillar, they would eat parsley or carrot flowers. Thank you for joining us. If you have any questions, you can contact us at livingscience@esc20.net or at 210-370-5688 or at 210-370-5688 Thank you again. Bye. Bye-bye.

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