Butterfly Houses Help Valuable Pollinators
Oskaloosa, Iowa – Pollinators have gotten a lot of attention in the past few years, as their populations continue to suffer. Bee’s and butterflies are significant players in the local ecology.
On Tuesday evening, the ISU Extension Office in Oskaloosa hosted a butterfly house workshop that would help interested parties build a wood shelter to protect the fragile insects from things like weather and predation.
Suzette Striegel is the county horticulturist with the Mahaska County ISU Extension Office which played host for the workshop.
“As many people know, butterflies are having a little problem with keeping their populations at acceptable levels, so anything that you can do to help them, be it planting food sources for the caterpillars, planting food sources for the butterflies, or providing shelter for them,” added Striegel. “Anything you can do to help those populations rise is a good thing to do.”
“So one of the things is having shelter. Now that can come from natural sources like trees and shrubs, but it also can come from an artificial source like a house like we are making today,” Striegel said. “It’s got a little space for the butterflies to get inside, and then you put roosting materials in there for them to relax on while they’re taking shelter.”
Many are familiar with the plight that the monarch butterflies are experiencing, but Striegel says that it’s not just the monarchs that are struggling.
Butterflies play an important role in the environment. “They do help us with a lot of our pollination. They are going to visit pretty much any kind of flower that’s out there. They’ll have their preferred sources, but they’ll pretty much visit any kind of flower. This is a great reason to plant flowers, because the entire growing season, they need flowers to visit.”
Wayne VanMersbergen put hours of prep into the class. He spent the time cutting out the butterfly houses for the group to assemble.
Not being familiar with what a butterfly house was, VanMersbergen set out to make one.
“It’s working with wood. I enjoy doing that. One of the unique things is, a birdhouse, you usually see a round hole. Well a butterfly, you don’t have round holes. You know, they flop out their wings, well how are they going to get in there. It’s a little slot. So I thought that was very unique,” said VanMersbergen. “So then also, we put some birch or some bark, tree branches inside, so when they fly in there, they have something to roost on.”
For VanMersbergen, building the butterfly house piqued an interest in the pollinator. “I’ve had a little bit of interest. You know they’re very colorful creatures. You know, lightweight, just fluttering around. I’ve been to some butterfly houses where you walk in and they’re all flying around and it’s just really unique there. But this piqued my interest more, so I’m anxious to get it located in my landscape where we can see it from the patio or the front window. Let’s see what happens.”
