How to identify, attract & support butterflies through their lifecycle
From a pinhead-sized egg on a milkweed leaf to a monarch drying its wings in the morning sun — butterflies are raised, filmed and photographed here, along with everything you need to bring them to your own garden.
The lifecycle
Every butterfly raised here passes through the same four acts. Tap a stage to see what’s happening — and what to look for in your own yard.
A female monarch lays each egg singly on the underside of a milkweed leaf — up to a few hundred over her lifetime, but rarely more than one per plant. The egg is tiny, ridged, and pale green. In about four days a caterpillar no wider than a thread chews its way out and eats the eggshell as its first meal.
Field guide
The four stars of the garden. Learn the markings once and you’ll spot them everywhere.
Danaus plexippus
Burnt-orange wings laced with thick black veins and white-spotted black borders. Males carry a black scent spot on a hindwing vein; females look darker and more heavily veined. The only butterfly that migrates thousands of miles — and returns.
Papilio glaucus
Sunny yellow wings crossed by black “tiger” stripes, with a single tail on each hindwing and blue-and-orange eyespots near the tails — females wear the most blue. Glides more than it flaps, sailing over gardens at treetop height.
Papilio cresphontes
North America’s largest butterfly, with wings that can span over six inches. Dark chocolate wings are crossed by a bold yellow sash and a row of yellow spots. Its caterpillar is a famous con artist — patterned exactly like a bird dropping.
Papilio polyxenes
Velvet-black wings edged with two rows of yellow spots and an orange eyespot at each tail corner; females trade some yellow for a shimmering blue wash. Check your herb bed — if something is nibbling the parsley, it’s probably this beauty in disguise.
The Butterfly Babe YouTube channel is home to real-time chrysalis emergences, caterpillar close-ups and garden tours — the next best thing to standing in the garden yourself. Watching there is the single best way to support the butterflies — every view helps.
Visit the YouTube channelAbout butterfly babe
Butterfly Babe is run by Lexy, who has spent years photographing and filming butterflies — not in far-off places, but in the garden, one patient morning at a time. What started as curiosity became a calling: raising monarchs and swallowtails from egg to release, documenting every stage, and teaching anyone who’ll listen how to do the same.
The videos follow the full journey: a female monarch testing milkweed leaves with her feet before laying a single egg, caterpillars mowing through leaves at a rate you can almost hear, the hush of the chrysalis weeks, and the moment — always worth the wait — when a brand-new butterfly pumps its wings full and lets go.
The long-term dream is bigger than a garden: Butterfly Babe is being built toward a nonprofit foundation for real-life butterfly rescue and habitat — because every patch of milkweed planted, every pesticide skipped, and every kid who watches a chrysalis open is one more wing in the air.
Monarchs and swallowtails raised in mesh habitats, fed on the right host plants, and released back into the garden — with survival odds far better than the roughly one-in-twenty a wild egg gets.
Emergences in real time, caterpillar showdowns, first flights. Years of footage, all shot in the garden — find it on the Blog & Videos page and on YouTube.
The goal on the horizon: turn Butterfly Babe into a nonprofit for butterfly rescue and habitat restoration. Every follow, view and purchase moves that closer.
Questions about a caterpillar on your parsley, a chrysalis that won’t open, or a garden that needs more wings? The fastest way to get in touch is a message on Instagram or a comment on any YouTube video — butterfly questions get answered all season long.
Message on InstagramFrom the channel
Every post pairs a YouTube video with the story behind it — what you’re seeing, why it happens, and how to spot it in your own garden. Tap a video to watch it right here.
There’s a morning in every butterfly keeper’s life that never gets old. The chrysalis — jade green for nearly two weeks — turns dark, then clear, until you can see folded orange wings pressed against the shell. That’s your cue: within hours, the case splits and a monarch pulls itself out, wings crumpled like tissue paper.
What happens next is pure hydraulics. The butterfly hangs and pumps fluid from its body into the wing veins, and the wings unfurl and stiffen over the next two to four hours. Disturb it now and the wings can set wrong — so the only job is to film, wait, and let the sun do the work. In this video you can see the whole row of chrysalises behind it, each one a butterfly with an appointment of its own.
After about two weeks of nonstop eating, a monarch caterpillar stops mid-bite, wanders off its milkweed, and spins a tiny silk button. It hooks its tail end in, lets go with everything else, and hangs upside down in the shape of the letter J. For the next half day it barely moves — because inside, the biggest renovation in nature is already underway.
Then, in just a few minutes, the skin splits behind the head and peels away to reveal the soft green chrysalis, which hardens into the smooth, gold-dotted case in this video. That gold band isn’t decoration, by the way — it’s a row of tiny reflective beads, and nobody fully agrees on why it shines. It just does, like everything about this stage.
Everything about the giant swallowtail is outsized. It’s the largest butterfly in North America, its caterpillar disguises itself as a bird dropping and defends itself with a forked, orange, funky-smelling “horn,” and its chrysalis — brown and twig-like — can wait out an entire winter before deciding the time is right.
So when one finally emerges on camera, it’s an event. Watch how much wing has to unfold: nearly six inches of dark chocolate and gold, packed into a case the size of your thumb. If you have a citrus tree, a hop tree or prickly ash nearby, this giant may already be visiting your yard — check the leaves for those unglamorous little “bird dropping” caterpillars before you judge them.
Put two champion eaters in one habitat and sooner or later they’ll meet — usually at full speed, usually over food. In this video (watch to the end, trust us) a monarch caterpillar plows straight over a swallowtail caterpillar in what can only be described as an epic tiny wildlife battle.
Nobody got hurt: caterpillars are built like soft tanks, and the swallowtail had a secret weapon it chose not to use — a bright orange, forked scent horn called an osmeterium that pops out when it’s truly threatened and smells like old pineapple. The real lesson for keepers: give everybody space and more host plant than you think they need. Caterpillars don’t share. They conquer.
New videos post all season — emergences, garden tours, and caterpillar close-ups. Subscribe on YouTube so the next chrysalis opening lands in your feed the day it happens.
Subscribe on YouTubeButterfly Garden
A butterfly garden is really two restaurants in one: host plants where mothers lay eggs and babies eat, and nectar flowers where the adults drink. Get both right and the butterflies move in on their own.
Host plants are non-negotiable — no milkweed, no monarchs. Start with the host plants in the table below, matched to the butterflies you want.
Flat-topped flower clusters are butterfly bars: zinnias, lantana, coneflower, butterfly bush and asters. Plant in sunny blocks so butterflies can feed without wasting energy.
Most insecticides kill caterpillars along with pests — including “natural” Bt sprays. Hand-pick problem bugs, tolerate a few chewed leaves, and let the birds do pest control.
Butterflies are solar-powered: give them flat stones that warm up in morning sun, plus a shallow dish of wet sand where they can “puddle” for minerals.
| Butterfly | Host plants (the baby food) | Field note |
|---|---|---|
| Monarch | Milkweed — common, swamp, butterfly weed | The only food monarch caterpillars can eat. Plant milkweed and they will find it, sometimes within days. |
| Black Swallowtail | Parsley, dill, fennel, carrots, parsnip | Plant twice the parsley you need — half for you, half for them. Extra dill is the cheapest butterfly habitat there is. |
| Giant Swallowtail | Citrus trees, prickly ash, hop tree, wild lime | Citrus growers call the caterpillar the “orange dog.” Gardeners who know better call it a future giant. |
| Eastern Tiger Swallowtail | Tulip tree, wild cherry, ash, lilac | A tree-level species — the females lay eggs high in the canopy, and the adults glide down to the flower beds to drink. |
Garden picks
The habitat, kits and seeds behind the videos. Each link is an Amazon affiliate link, so a purchase supports Butterfly Babe at no extra cost to you.
The pop-up mesh enclosure monarchs are raised in here. Fine mesh keeps tiny wasps out and caterpillars in, a clear vinyl window makes filming easy, and it folds flat between seasons.
