8 Brutal Truths about a Butterfly Garden!
8 BRUTAL TRUTHS that you need to CONSIDER before creating
your Butterfly Garden and becoming a Butterfly Landlord!
Many people think that having a butterfly garden is going to be a magical experience because no one tells you the brutal truth about becoming a butterfly landlord. It’s not to say that you won’t have magical things happening in your butterfly garden because…well…Mother Nature is amazing!
However, I have discovered there is a dark side to butterfly gardening and I think that people need to know exactly what they are up against before embarking on any Butterfly Garden Adventures.
So here goes;
1 – A Butterfly Garden is Messy, Weedy and may contain Invasive Flowers and Poisonous Plants.
The truth is the nectar plants that butterflies seem to prefer are weeds and wildflowers. Dandelions, nettles, and thistles are all considered weeds in most gardening scenarios and wildflowers are usually a little too disorderly for use in a formal garden setting. Some of a butterfly’s favorite wildflowers can even be found on The B.C. Invasive Plant List.
This makes the butterfly plant choices less desirable for those who insist on a tidy, non-invasive and weed free garden. However, potential butterfly landlords will need to realize that butterflies just love these types of flowers. To have a successful butterfly garden you will have to embrace the messy nectar rich plants that mostly just fall short of being invasive.
If weeds and wildflowers are not your thing then you might want to reconsider becoming a butterfly landlord.
Even if you can manage to avoid planting anything invasive, and can wrap your head around living with the weeds in your garden, it is still possible for other insects or diseases to infest your butterfly garden. And you will have to resign yourself to the fact that there is nothing that you will be able to do about it. Butterflies and other insects (both good and bad) are really sensitive to toxins so the use of any pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides in or near a butterfly garden is not recommended. And just because the packaging has the words “organic” or “safe” on it does not mean that you should be sprinkling that stuff around like fairy dust either.
It’s still poison-Deal with It!
Also, no raking of leaves! All those brown, dead leaves are to be left where they are. Certain species of butterflies like to use the messy piles of leaves to overwinter and hide from predators. Some butterflies also think that a pile of dead leaves makes a great butterfly nursery. As a butterfly landlord if you are trying to attract tenants to procreate and fill up your butterfly garden you will have to resist the urge to clean up. If peer or strata pressure dictates that you must tidy up your butterfly garden, then it is best to wait until late spring when the maternity ward is empty, and all the overwintering butterfly tenants have moved on. Until then, just learn to live with the leaves.
Furthermore, some caterpillars will require poisonous plants for food. For example, the caterpillar of the monarch butterfly feeds primarily on milkweed, and milkweed toxins are then stored harmlessly in their bodies as poison. If a bird tries to eat a monarch caterpillar it will make them extremely sick, and they will be less likely to try and eat that kind of snack again. Rural butterfly landlords also need to be aware that some varieties of milkweed contain toxins that can be poisonous to livestock.
For liability reasons (and to keep children and pets safe) it is essential that do your research before making any plant choices as even the most common of plants can be poisonous.
2 – Some Caterpillars will Sting you!
Even though you have met all your butterfly tenants plant demands they can still be ungrateful if disturbed especially if they are a butterfly impersonator (aka moth). Here in Canada, the larva of the Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly is one of the most common stinging caterpillars, but others include the offspring of butterfly posers like the Tussock, Tent and Gypsy moths. To avoid this issue be sure to identify which caterpillars are currently residing in your butterfly garden. This is especially true if small children who like to handle bugs are going to be anywhere near your tenants.
Plus it is always good to know what you are up against if it comes to the potential eviction or genocide of a butterfly impersonator. As a butterfly landlord sometimes sacrifices must be made for the environment and nothing could be worse than getting stung by a butterfly poser when you are just trying to provide a safe home for butterflies.
3 – Butterflies love Liquid Lunches!
Contrary to popular belief butterflies cannot live on nectar alone because it does not contain all the nutrients and minerals that butterflies need to survive. As a butterfly landlord you are going to have to entertain the males with disgusting liquid lunches if you want your butterfly community to thrive.
The best case scenario is to create a mud puddling station in a sunny sheltered spot. This mud bar is where most of the male butterfly tenants will gather to drink the mineral-rich water before going off to find a female to copulate with. As a butterfly landlord it can be a challenge to make a dirt and water filled dish look aesthetically pleasing however considering the alternatives you might want really contemplate just how far you are willing to go to attract butterflies to your garden. Some options are simply too revolting to even think about.
For example;
Rotting Animal Flesh!
Some butterfly species (particularly the tropical ones) have evolved specifically to dine on the juices of the dead. They can detect a rotting carcass from hundreds of meters away and although they do not technically eat the dead flesh, they do love swigging up the putrefying juices. Scientists and photographers have been known to use ripe shrimp heads, stinky fish and even rotting corpses of dead animals to attract certain butterflies for research and photo opportunities. I always thought a butterfly garden should be fragrant, but I never imagined this.
Then there are the Sh*t Smoothies!
If you have ever been in a cow field during the hottest days of summer, you have probably seen a bunch of butterflies gathered on a fresh, sloppy cow paddy. You may think it is a strange place for butterflies to gather but a butterfly just sees a pile of poop as a trendy Nutrient Rich Juice Bar. Fresh, wet animal poop contains all kinds of useful nutrients, which butterflies will eagerly swill upon if given half a chance.
As far as I am concerned, Sh*t smoothies might be acceptable for rural butterflies however adding fresh, wet piles of animal poop to my butterfly garden is a big fat NO for me.
Urine Slurpee’s!
Butterflies love guzzling on urine. They crave it and any kind of pee will do. They are especially obsessed with human urine because of the high salt content. Rumor has it that if they are unable to get a urine fix, they will even drink their own pee!
Apparently human urine will also act as a fertilizer for plants.
I endeavor to be a good butterfly landlord however I firmly draw the line to peeing ON or IN my butterfly garden. I am sure that my fellow gardeners at the community garden are extremely grateful for my thoughtfulness…just saying.
4 – Butterflies also like to drink Sweat and Tears.
If you have ever visited a butterfly conservatory, you might have experienced a magical moment when a butterfly landed on your finger. You might even mistakenly think that it was attracted to you because of your perfume or because you look like a flower.
The real, unsettling reason why a butterfly does this is because he (yes, it is most likely he) is a pervert and wants to lick the sweat off your body. If you can avoid thinking about what he is really doing, it can make for an amazing Instagram moment.
This sweat licking behavior is usually displayed by male butterflies and the salt from the sweat is thought to enhance their reproductive abilities. Some subtropical species of butterflies have even been known to drink the tears of turtles, crocodiles or sleeping birds.
Nevertheless, as a butterfly landlord you may not want to spend all day sweating in your butterfly garden just to supply your tenants with their sodium fix. After all you are not a bag of chips!
So to attract the right tenants you might want to create and install a salt lick station. This can be easily done by creating a shallow dish of sand, mixing in a small amount of sea salt and compost, and and then adding some water.
An even easier salt lick solution for butterfly landlords is to buy a small animal salt block at the pet store and hang it up somewhere out of reach of predators…. because otherwise that would just be a cruel snack bar experience for the butterflies.
5 – Butterflies like to eat Rotten Fruit and get Drunk.
As a butterfly landlord you might want to put together some Rotten Fruit Skewers for your tenants. While humans may not appreciate eating rotting fruit, some butterflies seem to absolutely love it.
Under the right conditions the sugary fruit ferments and turns into alcohol. Occasionally the butterflies will become so drunk from binging on the fermented fruit that they end up staggering around and flying drunk. And like last call at the bar, they may be so drunk that they will let anyone (including people) pick them up.
Now this might seem like a good way to use up overripe fruit, but it should be mentioned that it can also attract some uninvited guests.
Some daytime pests that may also enjoy fermented fruit are ants, roaches, and wasps. Putting your rotten fruit in a shallow dish of water will help to discourage those interlopers. Nonetheless, the water moat you created will not stop the nighttime critters like raccoons, possums, and rats from raiding and trashing your butterflies fruit dish. They do not even have to be drunk!
This means that you might have to remove the dish in the evening and figure out where to safely store a dish of rotting fruit with a side dressing of fruit flies. Or you may have to close the fermented fruit bar down permanently. If you are forced to do away with the fruit bar, then just be warned that masked nighttime raiders have been known to return and trash the place for revenge.
6 – Butterflies in the Caterpillar Stage get Hangry!
As a butterfly landlord, be prepared to plant extra host plants to help keep the peace amongst the caterpillars. Their appetites are HUGE, and they will fight over food!
A study from Florida Atlantic University found that caterpillars will become violent if food is in short supply. If host plants are insufficient the caterpillars will start getting hangry and then go all gangster and start lunging, head ramming and fighting other caterpillars to claim the food. They may even push another caterpillar off the edge of a plant if it feels like there is not enough food to go around. Researchers also found that caterpillars who were just about to build their cocoons were the most aggressive of all.
The reason that caterpillars are so food obsessed and aggressive at this stage is because they are storing up the nutrients that will help them in the cocoon phase when they will not be eating. Plus, it takes a lot of stored energy to digest yourself into a molten mess and then transition into a magical butterfly.
Regardless, as a butterfly landlord it is your responsibility to make sure that you have an adequate supply of nutritious host plants available so that your caterpillar community can peacefully transition into butterflies without all the violence.
Butterfly lives matter too!
7 – Butterflies and Caterpillars are Picky Eaters!
Butterflies have four life stages, only two of which have needs for food-the caterpillar stage,
and the butterfly stage.
As a butterfly landlord it is your obligation to make sure that there is an abundance of the right kind of foods being served on the menu at the right time.
This will involve doing a little butterfly research to find out which butterflies are in your area. Each butterfly species has specific tastes and if you want to attract a certain kind of butterfly tenant to your garden you are going to have to install the right kind of plants for both the caterpillar and butterfly stage.
Most adult butterflies will feed from a wide variety of nectar flowers however it is important to understand which native and introduced plants will attract the butterflies in your area. Single bloom, high nectar flowers are highly attractive to most butterflies but if they are to stick around, you will have to supply a maternity ward filled with host plants for them to lay their eggs on.
Furthermore, although the butterflies should be grateful that you provided a maternity ward the reality is that it is going to be trashed. Once the eggs have hatched, the caterpillar’s only purpose in life is to eat, and the butterflies offspring will quickly chew your garden to pieces because they are able to eat five times their weight every day. Plus everybody knows that what goes in must come out so at this stage it is an endless cycle of eat, poop, eat, poop. Not only are the host plants you provided going to be chewed up, raggedy, and sad looking but everything will be covered in Frass…which is just a fancy name for caterpillar poop. It is not a pretty sight and sometimes it makes a butterfly landlord wonder why no one mentioned this horrible aspect of having a butterfly garden.
8 – Neighbor Issues, Sibling Rivalry and Butterfly Rapists!
Butterflies are cold-blooded, and they need the sun to warm up or they will not be able to fly. This means that your messy butterfly garden will need to be located front and center in the sunniest part of your garden. If your neighbor happens to be Patty Perfect or if your strata council is of the anti-gardening variety, I can almost guarantee that your butterfly garden will be the thing that pushes them over the edge.
It is a fact-butterfly gardens do not always make for good neighbors and having one can sometimes result in fines and possible neighbor wars.
Butterflies also tend to lay their eggs in masses and sometimes being right next to their siblings is not always an ideal situation either. Occasionally after hatching, a caterpillar will get so hungry that it forgets that caterpillars are supposed to be vegan. Sheer hunger can sometimes activate the carnivore switch on a caterpillar and then it will start cannibalizing the neighboring eggs, devouring it’s siblings.
If the thought of this type of sibling rivalry grosses you out, then you might not want to be a butterfly landlord.
Pupal Rape-it is a thing!
Some of the more politically correct biologists will also refer to it as “forced copulation” or “pupal mating”. Call it what you will, during my butterfly research it came to my attention that some butterflies are totally oblivious to the “Me Too” movement.
Apparently, male butterflies will swarm around an unhatched female chrysalis and fight each other for the right to mate with her. Occasionally, instead of waiting for her to come out of her cocoon the winner will tear a rip open in the pupa and mate with her before she even emerges. Usually, a female butterfly will choose who she is going to mate with but when it comes to pupal rape she is trapped in her cocoon and has no choice in the matter.
This fact may bother you immensely as butterfly landlord however…your butterfly garden, your rules, your punishments…just saying!
So, after learning the 8 Brutal Truths about Butterfly Gardens if you decide that you still want to become a butterfly landlord then here are a few links to get you started:
Butterfly Identification
Electronic Atlas of BC Butterflies
David Suzuki – lower mainland Butterfly Illustrations
Butterflies of Canada – Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility
Butterfly Plants
Attract butterflies with native plants — Western Canada
Attract butterflies with native plants — Eastern Canada
135 plants to attract butterflies to your yard
Create A Butterfly Garden
How to create a butterfly garden
How to create a neighborhood butterfly way
Become A Butterfly Ranger
The Butterflyway Project – David Suzuki Foundation
Guerrilla Garden Adventures
Inspiring Garden Rebels everywhere to make the world a greener, happier and more creative place