Butterfly Feeders
Butterfly feeders are much more useful than butterfly houses and will almost definitely attract beautiful winged insects to your garden, much to the delight of friends and family. You’ll also be attracting very important pollinators much to the delight of your garden plants and flowers.
Many butterflies feed on nectar, and butterfly feeders usually have a central dish structure in which you can place varying amounts of nectar. Since not all butterflies like to get their source of sugar from nectar, butterfly feeders also usually come with spikes, indentations, or other structures on which you can stick or place pieces of rotting fruit; though the idea may seem disgusting to you, many butterflies love sipping sugar from fermenting fruit. Still others actually feed on carrion and mud; while you really can’t do anything about the carrion-feeders, you can complement your butterfly feeder with a mud puddle to cater to the mud-lovers.
If you put up a new butterfly feeder for the first time, you might want to try some tricks to lure butterflies into using it. First, you can place your feeder close to butterfly host plants; these are plants where butterflies either lay their eggs or flowers that butterflies usually visit for nectar. Second, you can make an irresistible fruit mixture. Mash up some fruit (bananas work well), mix it with sugar, molasses, corn syrup or honey (you can even mix in some fruit juice) and let it just sit for a few hours, preferably in the sun; after a few hours have passed, spread it outside on rocks, tree trunks, fence posts, and other structures leading to your butterfly feeder. Another idea is to soak a few sponges in a sugar solution and hang them from trees; doing this especially at dusk will attract butterflies.
As for the feeder itself, you may either purchase one or make one yourself. Hop online to find butterfly feeder plans or butterfly feeder kits for building a butterfly feeder of your own. Commercially produced nectar is sold in stores and often comes with store-bought nectar feeders. These commercial nectar solutions can contain a mixture of glucose, fructose, calcium, salts, halide salts and amino acids and claim to keep butterflies healthy. Experts agree that you can make your own nectar simply by combining 4 parts water with 1 part white granulated sugar and butterflies won’t be any less healthy (make sure you boil the solution so as to dissolve the sugar, then allow it to cool).
You may hang your feeder or mount in on some kind of post. Store-bought feeders should come with ant-guards and bee proof structures; to avoid ants, you can also coat their path to the feeder with petroleum jelly or mineral oil. Make sure your butterfly feeder is easy to disassemble and to clean and make sure it is leak proof.
