I love going into the Glasshouse in the winter, especially on sunny days, and seeing dozens of tropical butterflies flitting about. We’ve brought in some new species from Ecuador, and they are exquisitely beautiful! Speaking of butterflies, I receive a few calls every winter from families who have found moth cocoons or butterfly chrysalises or praying mantis egg cases on branches in their yards. Sometimes, they are attached to Christmas trees. When the cocoon, chrysalis or egg case is carried indoors to our warm houses during the winter, can you guess what happens? That’s right, the moth, butterfly or hundreds of praying mantises emerge at the wrong time of year! What can you do? You can bring it to the Garden and we’ll release it into the Glasshouse, where it’ll live out the rest of its life.  You could also attempt to feed the butterfly in captivity with a solution of 50/50 honey to water, which will help keep your butterfly alive for a few days. The challenge is that our houses are typically very dry in the winter and therefore not butterfly friendly, so don’t expect it to live for very long, unfortunately. If you bring in a moth cocoon and it hatches, it’s likely a silk moth. They don’t feed as adults and only live about week to breed and lay eggs before dying. For mantises, they would need live flies or other small insects to feed upon to survive in your house in the winter. My suggestion -  bring them to Garden if they hatch.  More importantly, thoroughly check the Christmas trees or branches you bring into your house in the winter so that nature can emerge when it is meant to emerge - in the spring.

Pictured above: Heliconius melpomene plesseni 

Tags: Butterflies, insects, winter

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:13 am and is filed under Butterflies, Cynthia Druckenbrod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.