About | West Lynn Garden and Butterfly House
West Lynn Garden and Butterfly House is a public garden created and run by volunteers who love gardening. Grab a map from the entrance, pick a direction and walk through and get lost in this wonderful garden, many of its paths intertwining.
The highlight of this place is the butterfly house. Come from December to April and you’ll see hundreds of Monarch butterflies. You’ll also be able to see the eggs, chrysalis and caterpillars, too, though they can take a bit of searching. You can tell the difference between the female and the male butterflies by looking at their wings. The females look darker because of the wider veins on their wings. And males have two black spots on the lower wings.
Entry fee is $3, drop your coins in the box before the gate or pay EFTPOS at the office.
10am to 4pm daily.
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A huge highlight to this garden is the butterfly house and seeing the butterflies flutter about, and there were heaps of them!
The life cycle of a Monarch butterfly
A female monarch butterfly can lay up to 300 eggs on the leaves of Milk Weed (the Swan Plant), usually underneath the leaf.
In the next 7-10 days, the little white eggs turn into tiny caterpillars. The first thing they do is eat the empty eggshell.
The caterpillar will spend the next 9-14 days eating the Swan Plant. When it’s ready, it will spin a silky thread, attach itself and hang from the plant and form a chrysalis.
While it’s in the chrysalis, it is changing it’s sixteen feet for six jointed legs, growing two antennae, wings and eyes that have colour vision. How amazing!
When it’s all done with its transformation, it’ll wait for a nice, sunny day to emerge, splitting the chrysalis. When it comes out, it’ll be all wrinkly, so it’ll spread out its wings and dry in the warm sun before taking off.
It will feed on nectar, using its long tongue to suck the nectar out of the flower, it’s feet have sensitive taste receptors that they use to locate the nectar.
There’s lots of little tracks you can discover as well.
