Painted Lady Caterpillars

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Our Painted Lady caterpillars arrived by post today. There are 5 of them and they are tiny. We called them Blinky, Crawly, Flingo, Leafy and Max. They have some culture (food) in the container with them, and they will eat this to grow. We will watch them grow bigger and bigger, and turn into Painted Lady butterflies. We can't wait to see that happen!

Meanwhile........we also have some cabbage white butterfly eggs. They are on a cabbage leaf. They are tiny and yellow and there are lots of them. When they hatch they won't have their own brown food, we will have to feed them fresh cabbage leaves (which luckily we have growing in our school garden). They should turn into white cabbage butterflies.

Tuesday, May 18th

We have had our caterpillars for one week now. They have really grown.

Friday, May 21st, 2010

We compared our week-old caterpillars with Ms. Flaherty's day-old caterpillars. They have grown so much in a week!Monday, May 24th
Most of our caterpillars are in cocoons now.

Wednesday, 26th May 2010

All our caterpillars are in their cocoons. We transferred them to their butterfly garden today.

Friday, June 4th, 2010
This morning teacher went in to school to check on the cocoons. She left a little banana, a little orange, a little strawberry (from our garden), and a little water in case any cocoon was nearly ready to open and let out a butterfly. In the afternoon she checked again, and was amazed to see Leafy out of his cocoon and looking very healthy. With a little help from her own children, she put some flowers in the butterfly garden as well - buttercups, daisies and dandelions. It is a pity that we are on holidays until Wednesday, because we are missing this excitement. Keep an eye on the website - teacher will check the butterflies every day and let you know what's happening.

Yesterday we watched Flingo for hours, to see would he change from chrysalis to butterfly. He was still in his cocoon before breakfast today, but changed as teacher was eating breakfast. How disappointing to miss that! Teacher got the camera ready, and hoped to film our final chrysalis changing today. It didn't happen, much to our disappointment. Maybe tomomorrow Crawly will want to join Leafy, Max, Blinky and Flingo as a painted lady butterfly. Have a look at today's menu for the butterflies. Can you spot the proboscis (straw like tongue) on the butterfly, for sucking up all that delicious orange juice.