Attracting Garden Butterflies
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Beautiful butterflies are welcomed occupants of any garden sanctuary. Providing plants for them to feed from and host their eggs is only one way you can attract them to your garden. Butterfly houses to keep cocoons safe is another option, along with adding butterfly feeders.
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Rustic look Copper Top Butterfly House offers a romatic touch to flower beds while offering a home for butterflies. Box is built from cypress copper
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Flutterbye Butterfly House provides a enchanting home for butterflies in the flower beds and encourages them to stay in the yard. Box is built from cypress
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Large Butterfly House provides a enchanting home for butterflies in the garden and encourages them to remain in the backyard. Box is built from solid
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Beautiful butterflies are welcomed occupants of any garden sanctuary. Providing plants for them to feed from and host their eggs is only one way you can attract them to your garden. Butterfly houses too keep cocoons safe is another option,. You can collect cocoon and place them in a butterfly house or place the butterfly house next to a larvae host plant and let the caterpillars crawl in there themselves. Also, consider adding a butterfly feeder specially designed for a butterfly's method of feeding.
Attracting butterfly tips:
Locate your butterfly sanctuary in a sheltered area that has at least six hours of direct sunlight. Butterflies do not regulate their body temperature very well, and this gives them a place to bask in the sun, which is particularly important during cooler spring time weather and early mornings. Butterflies need heat and start fluttering with a minimum air temperature of 60 degrees, but they fly best when it has warmed up to at least than 80 degrees. This is why you'll occasionally observe them resting in a sunny spot, absorbing the sun's heat with their wings stretched. Place a few flat rocks here and there for them to warm themselves on in the sun.
provide a puddle
Here is a simple project! Provide butterflies with a place to puddle. When butterflies gather around a puddle or other wet place, they are sipping needed nutrients. This behavior, called puddling, heightens the viability of the females eggs by transferring healthful nutrients. Provide a place to puddle by burying a shallow container filled with wet sand or soil, then placing a few sticks or rocks on top of the sand for butterflies to perch on. Plastic bottoms of plant pots work well for this, and it serves a secondary purpose. Many birds use mud to build nest, so while you provide a place for puddling, you are also adding nesting materials for birds. Be sure to fill the container with water when needed.
Butterfly Nectar Recipe
You can purchase pre-made powdered mixes or make your own nectar. Do this by mixing 4 parts water with 1 part granulated sugar. Boil for five minutes, or until sugar is dissolved, and then let cool. Store extra nectar in your refrigerator for up to one week.
As an alternative, leave small bits of overripe fruit such as bananas, oranges, and watermelon in the feeder. Butterflies use a assortment of food sources to nourish themselves including such savory delights as over ripe fruit and rotting vegetation. If have own an apple, plum, cherry or pear trees on your property, merely allowing fallen fruit to ferment on the ground will make for a favorite feeding spot for butterflies.
Do not toss those last bananas, mushy strawberries, over ripe peaches or nectarines, extra orange slices or left over melon ends either! Instead, use them in a butterfly feeder. One inexpensive source of over ripe fruit is the fast sale stand in the produce section of your food market store. Save extra bananas in the freezer. The banana skin will turn black but the mushy fruit that results when the bananas are defrosted will delight many butterflies and moths. Some butterflies will also drink Gatorade or similar sports drinks.
Place feeder in a sunny location, near bright flowers or natural other natural nectar sources, and enjoy visiting butterflies! You can use a hummingbird or oriole weather baffle to keep nectar from spoiling as quickly and maintain bright color. Clean feeders thoroughly at least twice a week to prevent mold bacterial growth. To clean, hand wash with a gentle dish detergent and sponge. A mild bleach solution may be used occasionally but take care of metal or brightly colored feeder parts.
In order to attract and keep butterflies in a landscape, you need to create the suitable habitat. If they find the plants they need for their young in your garden, female butterflies may lay eggs there, creating a new generation that grows to maturity in your yard. It's an effective way to encourage local butterfly populations, and the four-part life cycle is fascinating to watch.
Finding the Right Caterpillar Host Plants
Butterflies have four life stages, two of which have needs for food the larvae or caterpillars, and the adults or butterflies. In order to have more butterflies in a garden, you must provide the correct host plant for a female butterfly to lay her eggs. These eggs of course hatch into butterfly larvae, or caterpillars. The caterpillar can be very plant specific as to what it eats before going into the cocoon stage. Providing the right caterpillar host plants is crucial for success, as many caterpillars are picky eaters that require specific food plants. For example, monarch larvae only eat milkweeds. Black swallowtail larvae consume the leaves of dill, parsley, carrot, and fennel. Painted lady larvae eat thistle leaves. You must provide a specific food plant for such larvae, or you wont attract the adults!
Monarch caterpillars primarily feed on milkweeds. As they travel north from Mexico in the spring, adult females look for milkweeds on which to lay their eggs. It's a great help to the butterflies if gardeners on the migration route provide these critical caterpillar host plants. Obviously, planting a few milkweeds doesn't offset the massive loss of habitat that progresses daily as a result of urban sprawl and changes in rural land use, but every step counts.
One thing to understand is that it is probably going to be ascetically best for your garden to set aside an area just for butterfly larvae host plants. The butterfly female lays her eggs on the plant, the caterpillar hatches and then proceeds to eat. They eat a lot! A plant can be stripped bare in no time by a host of hungry caterpillars. Our personal arrangement is two mature butterfly bushes with fennel planted all about the base of the shrubs and a butterfly house staked in the midst. The butterfly bush provides food for the adult butterfly, and the fennel a host plant for the female (in this case, specifically swallowtails) to lay eggs. As the caterpillar consume the fennel, the destroyed plant is somewhat hidden by the butterfly bush. We end up with cocoons all over the place, usually on sticks or stems branches of the fennel or butterfly bush, the sides of the butterfly house.
butterfly houses
Using a butterfly house - our way, anyhow
Twigs are placed inside the box for any larvae / caterpillar who crawls inside to build a cocoon. Remember, place the box so that it is surrounded by host plants. The larvae are not naturally all going to crawl inside the box though. There are those caterpillars who build cocoons elsewhere but they are not usually too far from the host plant so we scan around to locate them. If a cocoon is on a twig or other movable item, they are placed manually inside the butterfly house for protection until the adult butterfly emerges. Wasps, bees, birds, mantis and other predators will eat cocoons. This process of placing the cocoons inside the house is not as high maintenance as it sounds. Eggs hatch in rounds, so basically you end up with several cocoons all at once until the next grouping of eggs hatches and matures. The small effort is worth it. We do have a lot of swallowtails on our property.
Butterfly larvae host plants:
Asters - Pearly crescentspot
Cherry laurel, black cherry, wild plums - Tiger swallowtail
Clovers and other legumes - Sulfurs, gray hairstreak
Dill, carrot, parsley, fennel, Queen Anne's Lace (Parsley family) - Black swallowtail
Dogwoods (Cornus species) and viburnum - Spring azure
Elm, willows - Mourning cloak, viceroy and question mark
Hackberries - Hackberry butterfly
Milkweed - Monarch
Mustard family - Cabbage and checkered whites
Native grasses - Various skippers
Oaks - Banded hairstreak
Passion flowers - Gulf fritillary and zebra longwing
Paw paw - Zebra swallowtail
Pearly everlastings - American painted lady
Pipevines - Pipevine swallowtail
Plantains (Plantago species) and snapdragon - Buckeye
Sassafras - Palamedes swallowtail
Senna, coffeeweed - Cloudless giant sulfur
Spicebush - Spicebush swallowtail
Tulip tree - Red-Spotted purple