How to Attract and Safely Catch a Butterfly | Butterfly Gardening and Farming | Easy to Follow photos

ByLisa Lightner Updated on Everyday

How to Catch a Butterfly

So this is one of those posts that has been in my mind for probably at least a year, maybe more. Every year I go to the PA Farm Show (January) and many years we go to the Great Allentown Fair. Each time we go to either of those venues, we visit Folk’s Butterfly Farm display/exhibit..

You can pay a couple of bucks and go into a screened room and they teach you how to catch butterflies. And, like any good Pennsylvanian, once you’ve seen some people twice a year for a few years, you start chatting with them. So I did. About my butterfly bushes. (I was so proud!)

how to catch butterflies

Butterfly Habitats

Butterfly planting…you’re doing it wrong!

And then, deflated. Because the guy from Folk’s said, “Yeah, butterfly bushes are great. But then the butterflies just come to eat and move on. You need to create a habitat.” Shut the front door! So simple, why didn’t I realize this?

So I got advice from him and from the internet. Now the Lightner farming agenda includes a butterfly habitat.

Butterfly habitats, who knew?

In case you’re thinking, “Um, ok, this is a disability parenting website, why butterflies?” Actually, we have a cousin, her son is autistic, and he has this incredible butterfly and other flying bug phobias. Mania. Aversion. He cannot be around flying bugs.at.all.

So, not that I want to traumatize a kid, but maybe in a faraway corner of their yard, they could slowly start to acclimate him to butterflies. Plus, new language skills, science lessons, outdoors, family time, the possibilities in finding value in this are endless! Touching dirt while planting (sensory), caring for another animal (displaying empathy), I could go on and on.

How to Catch a Butterfly

I have pictures and videos of my (then) 2 and 3-year old son catching a butterfly. Yep, just finding it on the bush and grabbing the wings. Sigh. He was well-intended. But we ended up with many flightless butterflies in our yard. The folks at Folk’s have such a simple trick.

Not everyone has a butterfly net, right? So you might be wondering how to catch a butterfly without harming it, or without a net. I had no idea it was so easy.

  1. Grab a q-tip or cotton swab.
  2. Dip it in juice or Gatorade (sugar!).
  3. Hold near a butterfly bush or where there are butterflies.

They will land on a q-tip or other similar implement with the sweet juice on it. It’s really that simple.

How to Attract Butterflies to Your Yard

Butterflies, like any other creature, need:

  • nectar (food) sources
  • hostplants
  • cover/hiding sources

I knew this for my birds, why not my butterflies? We must have half a dozen or more butterfly bushes in our yard. I guess I never noticed that they just flutter by and move on.

Here is the complete list from Folk’s, of which plants they recommend.

I am both overwhelmed and reassured by this list because I do already have some of these in our yard. Folk’s also has a recommendation for planting times on its website. We are pretty good about identifying birds, since we have active bird feeders. Now I’m excited about learning to identify butterflies.

How to Grow a Butterfly

During all this stay at home time, I became an accidental butterfly farmer. It started with “worms” that I found ALL OVER my parsley plants. I thought they were a pest, and I posted a photo in my gardening group.

butterfly farming
C’mon, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think this was a pest, right?

Thankfully my gardening group is smart, and right away they said DON’T KILL THOSE! Turns out they are butterflies. So I grabbed a few and stuck them in an old hermit crab container.

growing a butterfly
My chrysalis. One hatched as you can see, and the other hatched a few days later.

I put a stick in there so that they would have something to hang from with their chrysalis. They did not use it, choosing the lid to the container instead.

Each one took 2-3 weeks, I checked it daily morning and evening. When it hatched, I opened the lid and it flew away.

I do not like fennel, so I do not grow it in my garden. But in addition to parsley, they apparently like fennel. Others have had success with your gourd/squash type plants like zucchini, pumpkin and watermelon. I like parsley so I’ll stick with that. It was fun to watch him eat and eat and eat, before he formed his chrysalis.

butterfly on parsley

I hope you have fun with this, I know we will. {this was originally published in 2015 but was updated to check links and accuracy}