Raising Painted Lady Butterflies

The chrysalis in this picture is 9 days old. A Painted Lady Butterfly emerged from it about an hour after this photo was taken. If you look carefully, you can see the black and orange butterfly through the chrysalis shell.

About 7 to 10 days after becoming a chrysalis (or a little longer if the temperature is colder), the chrysalis becomes more transparent, showing darker colors inside with a few tiny orange spots. The black and orange showing through the shell are the butterfly's wings! Once the chrysalis begins to look like this, it's almost ready to split open so that the Painted Lady Butterfly can emerge!

Never open a chyrsalis shell for a butterfly. It's important that he do it on his own when he's ready.

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This is a newly emerged Painted Lady Butterfly pumping fluid Into her wings.
She must do this before she can fly for the first time.

Once the chrysalis splits, the butterfly very quickly comes out! It takes only a minute or two for the butterfly to emerge. The butterfly can't fly yet though. He must first get in a certain position, with his head pointing up, or even slightly backwards, and the tips of his wings pointing down. After getting in this position, he pumps fluid into his wings. As he does this, his abdomen gets a little smaller. Tiny bits of a red fluid usually come out of the butterfly. This is meconium. It's perfectly normal for butterflies to lose some meconium. It's just some leftover fluid that the butterfly doesn't need. You can see a little meconium and read more about in the section of this page entitled: Butterflies don't eat. They drink. (No, they don't drink meconium.)

The butterfly in the picture above dropped down to the floor after emerging from his chrysalis. He immediately walked across the floor of his habitat until he found a branch he could pull up on. He sat in the position you see him in now for a little over two hours, while pumping fluid into his wings and resting. Then he began to crawl along the branch a little.

This photograph, of another butterfly, was taken only a few moments after the butterfly emerged. This butterfly held on to the cup lid, in basically the same position as the other butterfly (with the tips of his wings pointing down) for a couple of hours. He too was pumping fluid into his wings and resting. You can see his empty chrysalis shell beside him, still attached to the cup lid.

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When the wings of a Painted Lady Butterfly are closed,
he is very well camouflaged against a tree branch.

The picture above was taken about 2 and a half hours after the butterfly emerged from his chrysalis. This is the same butterfly you can see hanging from a tree branch in a previous section.


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A Painted Lady Butterfly About Three Hours After Emerging

Did you know butterflies need the sun in order to fly? We didn't, until our butterflies emerged from their chrysalises. They seemed to be just sitting around even after their two and a half hour session of filling their wings with fluids was over. In fact, by late afternoon, they continued to just sit or walk around their habitat. Sometimes they opened their wings, but they kept them closed most of this time.

A quick internet search lead me to the information that butterflies need sunlight to fly. Our butterfly habitat had been in the kitchen, which was well lit with a sliding glass door and overhead electric lights, but that wasn't enough for the butterflies. They needed direct sunlight touching and warming their wings. I decided to move their habitat onto the floor directly in front of our sliding glass door. There was a nice patch of sunlight flooding in at that location! As their habitat entered into the sunlight, before I even placed it all the way on the floor, the butterflies seemed to "wake up!" They suddenly started fanning their wings, enjoying the sun! It was like magic! A few minutes later, they began to fly for the first time!!

When dusk came, the butterflies closed their wings until sunlight fell on them again in the morning. When morning came, I knew it would be late afternoon before direct sunlight would once again pour into our sliding glass door, so I took the butterfly habitat outside to the front yard for about 10 minutes, and again the butterflies took to the air, flying all around the aquarium.

Further confirmation of butterflies need for sunlight came the day we decided to release the butterflies into our back yard. All the neighborhood children were gathered to watch, the camera was ready, the large screen lid of the habitat was opened...and the butterflies just sat there. (Actually, the butterflies happened to be hanging onto the screen lid at this particular time, so when we took the lid off, we turned it upside down, so that the butterflies were now sitting on top of their habitat, with no walls or roof to stop their flight). Were the butterflies so fond of us they didn't want to leave? No, it was just late in the afternoon on a cloudy day, and even though it wasn't dark out, there wasn't enough direct sunlight to enable them to fly! No problem! We just put the lid back on and took them back inside. The next time we tried in the morning, on a bright sunshiny day! This time we had success, and the butterflies had their freedom!

How does it work? Research is showing that some of the scales on a butterflies wings collect the heat from sunlight. If you do a search online, you'll likely find several websites which talk about how humans are learning more about solar power from butterflies.

Here are a couple:
Butterfly Wings Have Solar Cells Inside: Inspiration for Scientists
Solar Energy from Butterfly Wings?

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Butterflies don't really eat anything. They do drink though. They have a very long tongue called a proboscis. It rolls up, much like a fruit roll-up, in their mouths, and can stretch out like a long arm or antennae when they pull it out of their mouths. In the wild, butterflies drink nectar from flowers. This helps the flowers because as they do so, they get little bits of pollen on them, which they then transfer to another flower, thus pollinating it and allowing it to grow seeds. Here's a website which talks more about pollination by butterflies: Pretty Pollinators: The Butterflies.

If you are raising some butterflies, you can add fresh flowers to their habitat. They also enjoy cut oranges, watermelon and apple pieces. In addition, you can prepare a solution of sugar water (3 teaspoons of sugar water to 1 cup of water.) and sprinkle or dip flowers or 2 inch large balls of wadded up tissue into the sugar water. Keep the extra solution in the refrigerator for later use.

Our butterflies enjoyed the fresh flowers with sugar water on them, as well as the orange slices. We didn't try the balls of tissue or the other types of fruit.

The light red color that you see on the paper towel near the butterfly is a little bit of meconium (the extra fluid that butterflies get rid of). One of our butterflies continued to lose meconium off and on for the first day. It was only very tiny drops here and there. The other lost all of his right at the beginning. Yet both butterflies were healthy and were able to fly away when we released them.

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Here's the aquarium which served as a habitat for our Painted Lady Butterflies.

Our caterpillars stayed in cups with lids (1 caterpillar to cup) until they became chrysalises. The cups had all the food that the growing caterpillars would need, so we had to do was watch them grow!

Once they become chrysalises, it's recommended that you leave them in the cup for about 24 hours or so, to allow the chrysalis to harden. Then very carefully remove the lid, taking care not to knock the chrysalis off! Some companies provide paper inside the lid and the caterpillars attach to the paper. Others simply allow the caterpillar to attach directly to the lid.

Next tape or safety pin the lid or paper into the butterfly habitat. It should be about 4 to 8 inches off the floor of the habitat. This allows the butterfly plenty of room to come out of his chrysalis when the time is right, but keeps him from dropping too far if he falls.

Because we were using a glass aquarium with a screen lid, we decided to add some tree branches to our aquarium and tape the lids with the chrysalises attached onto those branches. That worked well for us. We attached the lids at a spot on the branch that was the suggested 4 to 8 inches off the floor.

9 days after our caterpillars became chrysalises, they emerged as butterflies. Their metamorphis was complete! A few days later, we brought the aquarium outside, sat it near some flowers, and released our two Painted Lady Butterflies into our yard.

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Neither of our butterflies flew away immediately. When they did fly away, one flew quickly out of sight. There is a vacant lot beside us, and he flew off in that direction, to enjoy the trees and flowers growing there I suppose. The other flew only a few short feet onto the ground. Here's a picture of him.

After drinking from a flower which I helped him find, he too flew off to enjoy the world. You can see him drinking nectar in the photo below.

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