Caterpillar cocoons-anyone tried raising them?

[tigermeow]

DD is fascinated with the life cycle of a caterpillar/butterfly. Has anyone here tried buying cocoons raising them and observing. Where did you get the cocoons from?
Many thanks

when I was little my dad made us a butterfly box. I think we would find plants with caterpillars on and put them in the box and they used to eat and grow then make cocoons and we would release the butterflies.
There are a lot of caterpillars about now (most of them on my gooseberry bush ) so this would be quite easy to do

At DD1s nursery we ordered butterfly eggs from a company online and they hatched in the post into tiny caterpillars which grew and evenutally became cocoons.

But it's not that simple... as we had to hassle the company to send the amount we'd paid for and re-send a lot that never arrived. We ended up with only 3 cocoons and the butterflies still haven't emerged long after they should have...

I'm hoping it is so late in the year that they have decided to overwinter and hatch next spring with the first butterflies of the year...

I'll try and link to a very informative site about raising butterflies.

here

Obviously you dont need to do the growing of the cabbages yourself but you do need organic cabbage or else wash it very thoroughly, apparantly feding them non-organic cabbage slows their development...

Can anyone tell me how to tell if our chrysalises are dead or overwintering?

Am in Spain and it is very hot now so maybe they 'know' there are hardly any butterflies around now to mate with and have decided to wait? {hopeful}

wikipedia says

Pupation may be brief, for example 2 weeks as in monarch butterflies, or the pupa may enter dormancy or diapause until the appropriate season for the adult insect (in temperate climates pupae usually stay dormant during winter, in the tropics pupae usually do so during the dry season).

so yours might be sweating it out so to speak!

Hmm, thanks Ecmo. It is very, very dry here...

We had a butterfly garden and my son loved it.

www.greengardener.co.uk/butterfly.htm

On this subject, my dd found two large caterpillars in the garden on Friday. We brought them into the house, and put them into a butterfly pavilion (which we happened to have borrowed ages ago from a friend) along with some leaves (the ones that we found them on).
Now I have three questions that I hope someone can answer, as I really don't want to kill them:

1. Is there anything else special that we are supposed to do, does anyone know? Shoud I add water on anyway? Do we just leave them to it, or check up on them - not too easy as the leaves curl up and they seem to hide inside.
2. Should we be replacing the leaves regularly? Not really sure how we would do that because our garden only has one of that kind of plant...And I'm not sure of the name of it.
3. Does anyone know of a site online that could help identify what they are? I have books on identifying butterflies and moths, but nothing for when they are still at the caterpillar stage.

We ordered 5 catapillers and they turned into five butterflies. Insectlore will send you new catapillers if you do not get three butterflies.

not bought any cocoons.. but we found and end of season caterpilla last year..
popped it in a LARGE jar with air hole in lid.. gave it a twig or two.. looked the spieces up and found out to feed it cabbage.

it did it's thing and turned into a cocoon.. and the a butterfly which we released.

we were left with the case of the coccon on a twig!

great stuff.. good luck!