Insect Lore Cup of Caterpillars Basic – 5 Live Painted Lady Caterpillars with Food – Refill Kit for Butterfly Garden Habitat – STEM Science Activity for Kids & Classrooms

They grow up so fast! Tiny little caterpillars to butterflies - wiggling chrysalids and all! We had fun watching them emerge and eat nectar from different fruits. Made sure to time the release with nice enough weather so they could fly off into the world. It would have been good to have printed instructions in the box rather than going online.

I will never buy a cup of caterpillars through Amazon again. We have done this every year with my kids and have always ordered from the Insect Lore website, but this time I used Amazon because we wanted the cup quicker to show some friends who were staying with us. This was a big mistake. Every other year all 5 caterpillars have become butterflies and it has been such a fun experience for out kids! This year however when we got the cup, one caterpillar was already dead on arrival. A couple days later another caterpillar that was way smaller then the others on arrival also died. Still 3 were alive and eventually started making their chrysalis. One died before it could form it's chrysalis and fell to the bottom becoming a big pile of goo. 2 of the caterpillars have formed chrysalis and we have moved them to our big net. One of the them looks normal, and one of them is black, so I don't have much hope we will have more then 1 butterfly, and that's even debatable since all of them have died. The cup smells foul now that we have taken the lid off to put in the larger net, so I am wondering if the food was diseased or something. We do this every year and did everything according to the instructions, the only thing different this year was ordering through Amazon. I guess correlation doesn't always mean causation but in this case it's making me only ever want to buy through the Insect Lore website. I'll have to look and see if we still get the guarantee buying through Amazon.

This is a must buy for kiddos! We do some every summer and my little girl loves it so much!

My grandson and I "hatched" butterflies last Spring with these. One was doa, and another died shortly after arrival. However, the rest made it to adulthood, and were exciting to release into my garden.

All of them survived.