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Bill Robinson has made a second career out of butterfly farming.
Photo by Milton Morris
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Monarch butterflies taste food through their feet, so Robinson allows the insects to sample the fructose solution.
Photo by Milton Morris
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Once the butterflies have had a chance to taste the food, Robinson uses a dental pick to gently unfurl the feeding tube.
Photo by Milton Morris
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The feeding process takes about three minutes, then the butterflies are returned to mesh pens.
Photo by Milton Morris
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Lab technician Sandra Clossman gets up close and personal with a monarch butterfly during a release ceremony at Orangeburg's Mabry Center for Cancer Care.
Photo by Milton Morris
Butterfly farmer Bill Robinson understands how well his winged insects can lift spirits.
When friends and family of the late Evelyn Murphy dedicated a memorial garden to the longtime school principal in Anderson, the ceremony ended with dozens of Robinson’s colorful monarch butterflies taking flight.
“It was just beautiful,” says Kathy Dobbins, Murphy’s friend and colleague. “They represent a free spirit, and that was definitely Evelyn. It was a devastating loss for us and such a touching way to honor her.”
Robinson hears that a lot. His own loss—the long illness and passing of his first wife, Darlene—led him to begin breeding and selling the colorful insects, first to work through his grief, then to help others deal with theirs.
And, of course, to celebrate.
“We do a lot of weddings, too,” says Robinson, who grew his hobby into a thriving small business, Occasion Butterflies. “Releasing butterflies at a wedding is particularly joyful because sometimes the butterflies stay right in the immediate area. Some of them will remain near the bride, go onto the flowers that she is carrying and intermingle with the audience. The audience loves that, particularly the kids.”
A home fit for monarchs
Raising monarch butterflies is a second career for the former chief warrant officer in the Florida Army National Guard. He retired to six acres of pastureland in Clarendon County after working overseas as a missile systems specialist for Raytheon. Today, he and his wife, Frances, devote their time and energy to flying objects of an entirely different nature.
The airy kitchen in the Robinsons’ home includes two refrigerators. One, along with the wine cooler next to it, is filled with special mesh butterfly pens. Their screened-in porch serves as ground zero for butterfly mating, and outside are 600 milkweed plants in pots beneath a shady tree.
Milkweed is what monarchs eat in the wild, and fresh, hand-grown sprouts and leaves are vital to the labor-intensive process of raising healthy butterflies.
It all starts with the eggs. Small, white and delicate eggs are deposited on milkweed leaves and left to hatch in plastic kitchen containers. Tiny caterpillars emerge to feed on the leaves and grow quickly. In seven to 10 days, they transform into translucent blue-green chrysalises and finally emerge as bright orange monarchs.
“It happens amazingly fast,” Robinson says. “In just minutes, it seems like, they’re completely formed.”
“It’s really quite miraculous to see, and we just never get tired of it,” he says. “It’s quite a process, and scientists still really don’t understand exactly how it happens.”
To ensure proper nutrition, the Robinsons hand feed their butterflies every few days—a process as hands on as it is low-tech.
Frances Robinson reaches into one of their refrigerator’s mesh containers and gently clasps the first butterfly by its folded wings, handing it to her husband. Bill Robinson places the insect on the lip of an improvised feeding trough—an inverted plastic food-storage lid—filled with a fructose solution.
With patience, steady hands and a dental pick, he gently uncurls the butterfly’s proboscis, or feeding tube, and places it in the solution. It takes a few minutes for each butterfly to feed, so the Robinsons proceed in assembly-line fashion, adding more hungry butterflies to the trough before retrieving the first insects in line.
All fed, the insects are kept in a refrigerator at around 43 degrees until it is time to pack them inside special envelopes and insulated boxes and ship them to customers nationwide at a cost of about $5.50 per butterfly.
That nurturing care produces a healthy survival rate.
“Out in the wild, only one out of 100 eggs will make it as an adult,” Robinson says. “There are many, many predators. Mice, birds—just about anything out there that likes protein is going to eat a butterfly. They’re lucky to make it past two weeks, whereas the way we process ours, we keep them healthy.”
At any given time, the couple has approximately 120 butterflies on hand. Robinson says he can keep a brood for three or four months at a time, if needed, but there are limits. “They age and lose their scales and color,” he says.
After a few weeks, unsold butterflies are released into the back yard to help boost wild populations.
House calls and happy customers
Occasion Butterflies has garnered a reputation for adding a colorful flair to memorials, weddings, birthday parties and other special occasions.
“Bill Robinson is passionate about butterflies,” says Brenda Williams, vice president at The Regional Medical Center of Orangeburg & Calhoun Counties. She arranged a butterfly release at a ceremony for the recently expanded Mabry Center for Cancer Care.
“He took great care to deliver them in person and give explicit instructions about their release,” she says.
Rain is something Robinson recommends avoiding for butterfly releases. But rain during the Mabry Center ceremony didn’t dampen the celebration.
“The butterflies just go for shelter when that happens,” he says. “But they have to fly to get there, so it still went very nicely.”
One of the winged beauties, in fact, alighted on the shoulder of lab tech Sandra Clossman, to the delight of the crowd.
“We chose to release butterflies because they are a symbol of transformation and of new life,” Williams says.
“The butterfly release was the perfect complement to our event celebrating the completion of the new addition. The monarch butterflies are absolutely beautiful, and their release was inspirational and fun for cancer survivors, community members and staff.”
That’s music to Robinson’s ears. He clearly enjoys hand-delivering monarchs and witnessing the emotional impact they bring to special occasions.
“People just love butterflies,” he says. “There’s something so healing and peaceful about them.”
For information on monarch butterflies, contact Bill Robinson at (803) 840-3367 or (803) 452-6044.