How To Make Butterfly Food

In addition to selective planting of flowers and shrubs, there are many simple ways to offer butterflies their food. These alternative butterfly food sources, like over-ripe fruit or homemade butterfly nectar, are called “attractants.” Attractants will lure butterflies into your yard even if it isn’t an ideal wildflower meadow. Butterflies use a variety of food sources to sustain them, including such tasty delights as over-ripe fruit and rotting vegetation. If you own an apple, plum, cherry or pear tree, simply allowing fallen fruit to ferment on the ground will create a favorite feeding spot for butterflies.

Don’t throw out those last bananas, mushy strawberries, too-soft peaches or nectarines, extra orange slices or left-over melon ends either! Instead, follow the directions below to make an easy butterfly feeder for fruit! Learn more about butterflies and their habitat, including how to care for and raise butterflies in your home or classroom.

Beautiful photographs, lots of solid information on how to attract butterflies to your garden or raise them and release them into the wild. Kids, as well as butterflies, will enjoy the bright colors of this butterfly feeder. Just fill with a simple nectar recipe and wait for the butterflies! Five beautiful butterflies from the rain forests of Brazil in a 9″ inch framed display.

Sales controlled by the Brazilian Environment Department, under license and from legal suppliers, not harming the diversity of our marvellous forests. One inexpensive source of over-ripe fruit is the “fast sale” stand in the produce section of your grocery store; you might even get the produce manager to donate one or two unsaleable pieces of fruit if you explain the purpose. Save extra bananas in the freezer - the skin will turn black and unsightly, but the mushy fruit that results when you defrost the bananas will delight many butterflies and moths.

A ceramic or glass pie plate, plastic or terra cotta plant saucer, or a dish with a sloping rim can all be used to make easy butterfly feeders. Suspend the plate with flower pot hangers or fashion a macrame style holder from household twine. You could wind the stems of silk or plastic flowers around the twine holder to decorate the butterfly feeder and make it visually appealing to butterflies.

Simply hang the feeder from the bough of a shady tree, in a spot where you can easily view visitors to the feeder. Try to place it a little higher than your highest flowers. Add slices of over-ripe fruit. You can sprinkle a little fruit juice or water over the fruit slices if they dry out too much - remember it’s the mushy, rotting, very over-ripe fruit that butterflies like best.

Replace the fruit if it dries out or becomes moldy. “An alternative food source for butterflies is a homemade feeder filled with a solution of 4 parts water to 1 part granulated sugar. Boil the solution for several minutes until sugar is dissolved, and then let cool. Serve the solution in a shallow container with an absorbent material such as paper towels saturated with the sugar solution.

Bright yellow and orange kitchen scouring pads may be placed in the solution to attract butterflies and give them a resting place while they drink. Place the feeder among your nectar flowers on a post that’s 4-6 inches higher than the tallest blooms. Punch a small hole in the jar lid with an awl or a hammer and small nail.



If you wish, insert a colored kitchen scouring pad to provide an alluring spash of color to attract the butterflies. Alternatively, decorate the outside of the jar with waterproof paint (simple, bold flower shapes would be ideal) then finish with clear sealer. Another decorative idea is to glue plastic or silk flowers to the outside of your jar.