The ‘Live Butterfly Garden’ – Kama’s Experience [VIDEO]

If you have young kids then most likely you have seen the commercial for the Live Butterfly Garden on Sprout, the PBS kids channel, when you're waiting for Caillou or Barney to come back on. Well, my husband is what you can call a "sucker" for hands on activities to do with Tula, our 2 year old daughter. And metamorphosis was right up his alley.

He did the research and found out if you ordered on the phone you got 10 potential Painted Lady butterfly caterpillars, instead of the 5 you would get if you ordered online for your $19.99 + S&H. You also get a poster, stickers and the mesh bug tent. Soon, an email confirmation was received from Insect Lore (I say "Insect Lore" with a Sean Connery voice) confirming "2 units of larvae" were coming our way. I thought to myself "Super, I love larvae! Not!" I was against the potential heartache involved. We've been through this with the fish that always end up "swimming away". My husband said I was just "against fun".

It arrives as plastic containers with tiny little caterpillars at the larvae stage crawling around in what looks like sand.

The sand is their food. Soon the larvae get big and become official caterpillars. The caterpillars soon find their perfect spot hanging from a small plastic lining on the lid of the container and hang there to become a chrysalis or what we would all think is a cocoon. GET THIS, inside the chrysalis the caterpillar will turn to complete liquid before reforming itself into a butterfly, crazy. Once all 5 per container are officially hanging from the lining, you TRANSFER the lining to the mesh tent. This part freaked me out so I filmed it for everyone to see.

It took another week for the chrysalis to start to split open and let the brand new butterflies sort of fall out. Initially they are all crumpled up, but then they start unfolding their wings to dry and during this time disgusting bloody looking liquid will leak out, which is not blood, but actually meconium just like a human baby has. We hung the mesh bug tent in the kitchen so I could stare at it when making dinner! Not really, but it was the best place for viewing this cycle. We fed these new butterflies sugar water on a paper towel and waited for all their friends to arrive.

Keep in mind they only guarantee 6 out of the 10 potential butterflies. But we did good! 10 butterflies later, it was time to release them, otherwise their 2 to 4 week life span may end while I make cheesy eggs. Not on my kitchen timer!!! So 3 weeks after the larvae arrived at our house, and a major toddler haircut later, we RELEASE the butterflies.

It's been a long time since I took a science class and frankly I don't remember ever learning some of the details of caterpillars and butterflies. But this was interesting and now everytime we see a butterfly here in Fort Collins, we think about the process and just how many days that big beautiful butterfly has left. So to learn more, I decided to contact an expert.

I contacted Dr. Whitney Cranshaw, Professor of Entymology at Colorado State University and author of several insect and bug books to tell us more about butterfly life around Fort Collins.