How to Take Care of a Butterfly House

Video Transcript

"So there is, there's really kind of two different things you could talk about with butterfly houses. One is having a home butterfly house or a conservatory with plants planted for butterflies and have butterflies flying free in the conservatory. Where they live protected lives and they don't have to be worried about predators or anything like that. And what you need to do is, plant the flowers of butterflies with nectar on them and probably supply some supplemental nectar feeders and some fruit. And you could raise or catch butterflies in your yard or you could, or like on a larger scale, a butterfly conservatory would have butterflies from all around the world, that were produced on farms. And they are kept in a greenhouse or a screen house and just fly around freely in there. As long as you have proper light and it needs to be in a funny location and you'd have a lot of food for them. Because if you put several hundred butterflies in a 4000 square foot area, they'll run out of food with just flowers. The other type of butterfly house that people ask about is the little one boxes with the slots in them, that you put in your yard. And that's aimed at keeping butterflies over winter and giving them a safe place to stay in the winter. And those actually, they are found to be kind of a gimmick. Like, they don't really work and more often that not, you'll have wasps and bees nesting in them or you'll have spiders hanging out in them before you get a butterfly. And butterflies actually see crevices and cracks, just a place to spend the winter. And the side of your house or a log pile is, thousand of crevices and cracks and that box is usually two or three slots. So the chances of them actually being in a box are pretty slim. So it's a decorative thing for a garden, but it's kind of a novelty and it's not actually a functional thing."