Insect Lore Butterfly Garden

If you loved science as a child, you’re likely familiar with the Insect Lore Butterfly Garden, a kit that lets you raise real caterpillars through their entire lifecycle, from larvae to full-blown butterflies. The kit offers a rare and special experience for kids (or adults!) to witness the full lifecycle of a living creature up close.

Each kit comes with a voucher to redeem for free to receive baby live caterpillars. When you’re ready to watch the magic happen, simply redeem the voucher on the Insect Lore website (insectlore.com) and you’ll be sent a cup of  five baby caterpillars and all the food they need to grow. Also included in the kit is the mesh habitat, a flower-shaped butterfly feeder, sugar packets to make butterfly nectar, a feeding dropper, a very descriptive instruction guide, and a STEM butterfly journal with fun science, math, and writing activities.

The entire process takes about three weeks. Here’s a look at my experience:

Week One: The Caterpillars Arrive

The kit arrived with a cup containing five teeny tiny caterpillars. Within a few days, I started noticing them move around, and by the end of the week, they were much bigger. They grew pretty quickly, which was interesting to me. At this stage, not much to do but watch!

Week Two: Chrysalides Form

One by one, the teeny caterpillars climbed to the top of the cup and hung from the lid. Within a day or two, they started forming chrysalides—I was shocked at how quickly that happened. After two days, I moved the paper disk attached to the lid into the mesh habitat.

Week Three: Butterflies Emerge

Definitely the most magical part of the process. On day 18, my very first butterfly hatched. Its wings were still wet and appeared crinkled—like a newborn baby! Over the next few days, the rest hatched. I made butterfly nectar and added fresh orange slices to their habitat for them to munch on as they tested out their wings.

Release Day

I must admit I was a little sad to see them go, but after they clearly mastered the art of flying inside the habitat, I knew it was time to set them free. I took the mesh habitat outside, unzipped it, and one by one, they all flew out. Most of them flitted around my backyard for a while, resting on leaves and flowers before they all dispersed into the neighborhood.

From caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, the entire experience is really engaging and quite miraculous to witness. It’s also very accessible—you don’t need any special tools or background knowledge, and it is still incredibly interesting without being confusing. It’s a great learning tool, whether you’re introducing it to your classroom, in a homeschooling environment, or if you’re looking for a summer vacation project. Overall, it was a simple, rewarding, and honestly very cool experience that reminded me so much of my childhood.

If you’re interested in checking out an Insect Lore kit yourself, check out their website at https://www.insectlore.com/ Not only can you get your own Butterfly Garden kit, but you can also purchase accessories, order more caterpillars (if you want to make it an annual tradition!), and for teachers, there are classroom kits with additional caterpillars and habitats.

Insect Lore was founded over 50 years ago by Carlos White, an entomologist (a scientist who studies insects) with the wonderful idea of making butterfly metamorphosis something we could experience up close. Insect Lore was the very first butterfly growing kit (& they’ve expanded to ladybugs and ants!) and sold its one millionth butterfly growing kit in 1990. In 1999, Insect Lore caterpillars made an experimental journey to outer space with NASA—you can check out a video of that trip here. Since then, Butterfly Gardens have achieved the status of #1 selling product in Toys and Games on Amazon, been awarded the STEM.org Authentication Trustmark, won the “Best in STEM” award through Newsweek, and most recently, in 2021, Insect Lore educational kits were recognized as STEAM TOYS by The Toy Association in partnership with Dr. Gummer’s Good Play Guide.