Here at Lady Bug Exotics, our handmade art showcases the beauty of nature, in beautiful frames for your home. Our mission is to show how beautiful nature is and that it needs to be protected. How can we do that by killing insects and framing them? The beauty is that we don’t actually kill anything. All of the specimens we use to handcraft our products are purchased directly from conservation farms all over the world. They are allowed to live out their full life cycle in natural settings, closely managed by conservation farmers who ensure an optimal environment to allow the populations to thrive.
As adults, an insect's strongest drive is to reproduce. Most of our butterflies naturally die shortly after this has been achieved. Adult Atlas moths have no mouth and so don’t eat, which is why the caterpillar will eat as much as possible during the larval stage for the insect to survive its short life. Once adult moths emerge, they live only one or two weeks at a push. A single female Atlas can lay up to 500 eggs in her lifetime, so very few females are required to start captive populations.
Butterflies are not just another pretty face. Like bees, these colourful creatures are also an integral part of the interdependence and interconnectedness of nature as they too pollinate flowers while they flit around drinking delicious floral nectars. If butterflies and bees disappear, so will humans.