This document provides instructions for rearing Battus philenor butterflies from egg to adult. It details how to care for newly emerged butterflies, feed them sugar water, get them to mate and lay eggs. Instructions are given for collecting and storing eggs, feeding hatched caterpillars, and housing caterpillars as they grow. The document also covers how to care for pupae and emerging adult butterflies. Maintaining clean rearing containers is emphasized. The goal is to clearly outline the full life cycle and rearing process to successfully breed these butterflies.

1. Rearing Battus philenor 101

2. First things first, you are going to want to care for your newly emerged butterflies. If you want to keep track of
individuals, now is a good time to label them with a gold paint pen on their lower wings as close to their bodies as
you can (the edges of the wings tend to get damaged and marking there will be more vulnerable).
You can generally wait a day after they emerge to feed them sugar water, but it also couldn’t hurt to do it on the
same day.
1) Fill the larger piece of a
petri dish with your sugar
water solution until it reaches
all the way around the edge.
2) Nest the smaller piece of the
petri dish inside the larger piece
top down to get a “moat” of sugar
water around the edge
3) Grab your butterfly with
wings closed. Make sure you
pinch both set of wings or they
will flap them around and
damage them
4)Stick your “poking device”
into the curl of the butterflies
proboscis and roll it into the
sugar water mote. They may
fight you on this, so you have
to be careful not to unroll the
proboscis if their legs have
grabbed onto the poking
device.

3. You can line up as many butterflies as you can around the edge of the petri dish. You’ll have to watch for them to
finish and roll up their proboscises and remove them right away, or else they will crawl over the others and knock
them out of place, which can get really annoying. But when they cooperate this is really cute :)

4. If you are keeping track of who mated with whom, you will want to keep your males and females in separate cages. When you do
want them to mate, basically just let them all fly around in a large enclosure with UV lights and check every 10 minutes or so to move
mated pairs into their own enclosure. They can mate for up to 24 hours.
After they have mated you will want to collect eggs from the females. If you want to keep track of each females offspring separately,
you will want to spend some time coaxing each female to lay.
1) Select a stem of host
plant with a sprouting tip (If
they don’t taste the
sprouting tip, they will not
lay on that plant).
2) Tape your
aquapick to a
surface with
holes in it for
the plant stem.
3) Place your stem
into the aquapick.
They wilt a bit right
away after being cut,
but should spring
back to life after being
in the water for a few
minutes.
4) Grab your female by the
wings and allow her to taste
the sprouting tip of the plant
with her front legs. After a few
seconds of this you can
usually let go of her and she
will maneuver around on the
plant to find good purchase for
egg laying. I would let her
start laying before putting your
bottomless cup over her and
the plant.
5) Place a square of window-screen over
the top of the cup to prevent escapes.
Check on her every half hour or so. If
they aren’t laying you can try to reposition
them on the plant like at the beginning.
After a couple hours you should have
about 30 eggs from each female. Collect
them by gently rolling them off the leaf
with your finger into a petri dish.Store
those eggs at 30 degrees celsius.

5. If you aren’t concerned with keeping track of
families, you can have a general egg laying cage or
two with your mated females. I would put in one
stem per every 2-3 females in the cage. The stems
are just kept in the aquapicks and stabilized by the
erlenmeyer flasks. Collect eggs daily and store at 30
degrees clesius.

6. When your eggs start hatching (about 4 days after being laid) you will want to move them into the cups for feeding
as soon as possible.
1) Fill your large
cup with deionized
water to just below
where the nested
smaller cup
reaches. You don’t
want any water to
seep into the small
cup, but you want
your stems to reach
the water through
the hole in the small
cup.
2) Place a stem with a
few nice young and light
green leaves into the hole
drilled into the small cup
and into the water of the
larger cup. Plant quality
is important at this stage.
The leaves should be soft
rather than tough, without
any sun damage, and you
really want the light
yellow-green color.
3) Move the tiny newly
hatched caterpillars onto
the leaves with a paint
brush. Make sure they stay
on the leaf, sometimes they
fall off right away and you’ll
want to try to get them to
silk themselves into place
on the leaf again. You can
put up to 30 new
caterpillars in 1 cup.
4) Secure a
square of window
screen over the
top by folding it
into place
between the
nesting cups.
5) Throw a label on
it with the family
name if you’re
keeping track of
that, and the
hatching date so
you can monitor
growth.

7. After a couple of days of feeding in the cup, it is much easier to feed them enough in boxes. They eat like monsters at this point,
and the quality of the plant is less important. If you want to continue raising them in cups, that works fine too, but after they reach
third instar you will want to have less caterpillars per cup (I would say 3-5 is ok) because you won’t need to add food as often. We
feed twice a day, once in the early morning and once in the late afternoon-early evening).
1) Place a paper
towel in the bottom
of a standard
rectangular
tupperware box.
2) Place a stem
of food into an
aquapick with
deionized water.
Put in one stem
for every 3-4
caterpillars in the
box.
3) With a large
number of caterpillars
per box, it can get
kind of gross
relatively quickly. I
changed out the
paper towel and
dumped the poo out
every other day or
so. If it gets really
bad, or if you see any
sick looking
caterpillars, change
out the whole box.
The aquapicks tend to leak a little bit, which doesn’t help with keeping everything clean. Putting the box at a slight incline
with the tips of the plants at the highest point, and the base of the aquapicks at the lowest point minimizes leakage.

8. That’s pretty much it! They will pupate in the boxes or cups, and you can move them to
whatever conditions you would like. We taped them to a flat surface and put them at an incline
inside of a cage where they could emerge and crawl to a high point to extend their wings. If you
want to keep track of families you can let them pupate in the cups, then let them emerge in the
cup as well. They will grab onto the window screen at the top to let their wings dry--if you do this
just make sure they have enough space in the cup to extend their wings (remove any extra plant
food from before they pupated etc.).
Then you just start over at the beginning. Let me know if you have any questions. I’m not sure
how long my UofA email account will be active, but you can email me at sogladur@gmail.com,
or you can call or text me at 520-529-9363. I will let you know if my phone number changes
when I move.
Good Luck! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to do this this summer! It has been a very
valuable experience!
-Bekah