Monarch Butterflies

For Easter we got Landon a butterfly tree house. We had to order caterpillar's, and when we got them there were about 5 in a cup. Inside the cup, on the bottom was some caterpillar food. After a couple days, the caterpillars crawled to the top of the cup and formed their chrysalis'. At that point we took the lid off of the cup, and clipped the cocoon's to the mesh butterfly tree house. Within about 8 or 9 days, we had butterflies! It was a great project, and the kids as well as Tony and I really enjoyed seeing the butterflies transform. It's just not something you get to see everyday! We did have one that never emerged, and one that had deformed wings. It would never fly, but we put it outside anyway's. Here is one I was able to get a good shot of before he took off. He still was pretty fuzzy on top, but we let them all go because it was too hard to "feed" them. We couldn't tell if they were "eating" their sugar water!