Raising Painted Ladies

 Early in April I received an email letting me know that one of the resource companies that I purchase homeschool material from occasionally was doing a big butterfly larvae order and since it had been a few years since we had raised any butterflies and they were willing to ship them to me I was all over it :)

 Two months nearly passed and one day there was a surprise package that needed to be picked up at the post office. Of course silly me had completely forgotten all about the butterflies by the time we reached June and it wasn't until I saw the red 'live specimen' tags on the outside of the box that I finally remembered that we were waiting for them *grin*.

Our caterpillars were well on their way when we placed their container on the mantle in the living room so they could happily munch away. Only a few days later it seemed they started to hang from the fabric top and spin their cocoons....

and the beautiful metamorphosis from wiggly caterpillar to butterfly began resulting in six pretty orange and black painted ladies. We were all captivated by them as they slowly stretched their wings, pumping blood into them and learning how to make them work. 

 We got this little pop up mesh enclosure the first time we got butterfly larvae a number of years back and it has been fantastic for housing other little creatures besides butterflies that the kids bring home to visit... like frogs, salamanders and so on :)

 It was tempting to keep our little visitors longer so that we could enjoy their beauty but today the sun was shining and it was time to let them take their first big flight.

Each of the children took turns helping one of the butterflies out of their temporary home and enjoying the tickle of its feet on their palms before it flew away.

Butterfly and Flower

See the flower open
Its petals one by one -
Butterfly wings upon a stem
Waving in the sun.
See the flitting butterfly
In shimmering colours bright -
A flower free and flying
In the warm summer’s light.

~ Paul King

Hugs,

Rosina

Growing Colonies Of The Fuzzy Kind

I thought it would be fun to share just what we're growing in the kitchen this week :) No it's not vegetable seedlings or easter grass.... think a little more creepy *grin*. We're raising our own colony of bacteria :)

We started with three petri dishes and to try and keep it as scientific as possible I got my oldest to boil and sterilize all of the dishes before we started so that we could keep as much extra bacteria out of the equation as possible.

As soon as our petri dishes were ready to go we filled them with agar or in our case gelatin since I didn't have actual agar :) We brought one cup of water to a boil, stirred in one teaspoon of sugar, one package of knox gelatin and a few drops of orange food coloring and simmered the whole thing for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes were up we portioned out the gelatin equally into each of the three petri dishes and waited for it to cool and set.

The next step was to decide just what we wanted to swab and transfer into our dishes. K had such a hard time picking since we could only use two dishes and he wanted to try so many different things :) So he settled for the kitchen sink and the telephone with our third dish as the control.

At each place he took a clean q-tip and swabbed it all over their surfaces and then he took it to one of the petri dishes and gently rubbed it over one quarter of the gelatin then turned the dish 90 degrees and rubbed it again over the quarter section making sure that he pulled some of his strokes through the edge of section he swabbed last until the entire dish was covered :)

With each one carefully labeled...

it was time to wait and see just what would happen!

We're five days into our experiment and things are growing and remember all that sterilizing we did in the beginning so that we would have a super clean control petri dish? Well that baby is growing some funky fuzz of its own! LOL.

If you grow some colonies of your own let me know. I know my son would love to see what grows in your petri dishes *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

PS. Looking for more crafty ideas or inspiration? Pop over to Natural Suburbia's Creative Friday and see what others are up to :)