On the flutter farm

By JEFF KLINKENBERG

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 22, 2001

In North Florida, the Greathouse family makes a profit by making the world a little more beautiful.

EARLETON -- Kay Greathouse loathes nature. Ever encounter a great big banana spider inches from your face? Kay has. During her escape, she came close to defying gravity.

"What I really hate are snakes. My husband says they're just harmless rat snakes, but I am sure they are something poisonous." She remembers the time she ambled out of the house and nearly tap-danced on 5 feet of coiled something or other.

Butterflies are different. For Kay, they transcend nature. They are a wispy gift from heaven.

Kay is like other squeamish Americans who are perpetually nervous about the creepy crawlies in the shrubbery but enthralled with people-friendly butterflies that light on the hibiscus or your head.

Maybe it's all the pavement, maybe it's pesticides, but there seem to be fewer butterflies to make the world beautiful these days. That's where Kay and kin come in. They are trying to fix the butterfly deficit.

Under a stately grove of ancient trees, in a rural patch of North Florida, the Greathouses -- who grew pecans for generations -- have metamorphosed into the nation's biggest butterfly farmers.

A butterfly boom

THE LEPIDOPTERAN LIFE: Top to bottom, first come the eggs, clinging to a plant of the butterfly’s choice. Next is the caterpillar, which gorges on the plant, then turns into a pupa. Inside its hard shell, the pupa undergoes a metamorphosis. Out of the shell, finally, come butterflies.

Kay Greathouse, on a hunting trip inside a screened greenhouse, talks to her butterflies.

"Come on!" she whispers. "You know I won't hurt you. I'm going to send you on a nice long trip."

The monarch butterfly settles long enough for Kay to net it. Then she deposits it into a special envelope that goes into a special ice chest that by day's end will be on an airplane heading for an Indiana wedding. At the proper moment, wedding attendees will release butterflies instead of rice.

It's a new world for the Greathouse clan, who grew their first pecan near Gainesville before the Civil War. By the 20th century's end, when the nation's nut supply exceeded demand, business turned stale. Zane Greathouse, a fifth-grade science teacher in Gainesville who helped his family in the pecan trade, wondered about a different kind of farming. A lifelong nature lover, he'd enjoyed growing butterflies for his students.

It turned out grown-ups wanted butterflies, too. After five years in the bug biz, the Greathouses are America's busiest butterfly wranglers.

"We can't satisfy the demand," says Zane, who had to enlist the help of his older brother, Dan. Retired from the Marines, Dan had been wearing himself out in the pecan groves. Pretty soon, the butterfly boom necessitated Dan bringing in his wife, Kay, to assist.

Butterflies aren't free. In a good week, the Greathouses sell them by the thousands at $5 apiece retail and about $3.50 wholesale. Wholesale markets, which buy butterflies in big numbers, include zoos, museums, universities, nature parks and the film and advertising industries. Meanwhile, there is a smaller demand from ordinary people who want a few butterflies to release at weddings and funerals.

"Hmmm, what's this?" Kay asks. She has just nabbed an interesting butterfly inside a screened room where butterflies flit by the dozens. "I think it's a spicebush swallowtail butterfly. Pretty nice, huh? I'd like to ship it away, but we may need it to produce some babies."

Kay is the farm's distribution manager. Several times a day, she visits the office to check for orders. Awaiting perusal are faxes, voice mails and computer messages. The Bronx Zoo wants American swallowtails. The Museum of Natural History in Manhattan needs ruddy daggerwings. St. Petersburg's Sunken Gardens will settle for the official state butterfly, zebra longwings.

The phone rings. It's a kid.

"He wants a couple of butterflies for a science fair project," Kay calls out.

You'd think the kid could catch his own. It's tougher than it looks.

"Worst thing a butterfly can do is fly at your face," Dan says. "Can't tell you how many times I've tried to bust my own nose with my butterfly net."

Janet Littlejohn checks on the eggs in the farm’s “cage room.” Each plastic box is kept damp with vapor and cleaned daily while the eggs mature.

Not inside, you don't

"Hey, bunny rabbit," Kay greets her husband.

Blushing, Dan looks around in panic as if his Marine buddies might be eavesdropping. They grin when Dan tells them he traded his battle sword for a butterfly net, but they might look at him differently if they knew his bride calls him bunny rabbit and buggy wuggy.

Dan and Kay, both 52, met in high school. On their first date, a trip to the drive-in, Kay fell in love and knew they would wed. They married within the year, and Dan joined the military and stayed nearly three decades.

If they were to marry now, they could release butterflies at their wedding. Not in the church -- "butterflies fly right to the lights and die," Kay says -- but outside in God's good sunshine.

"I tell brides -- I warn brides -- don't you hand out butterflies before the ceremony. If you do, you'll lose your audience. Everybody will play with their butterflies. Wait until the bridal party is outside the church. Then release the butterflies instead of throwing rice."

Kay has hair as red as a Julia butterfly. She likes to believe that she and her assistants, Rachel and Teresa, do most of the important work around the farm. Of course they do. Teresa breeds the butterflies and Rachel helps Kay catch them when they fill orders.

"If we staged a walkout, the men'd be lost," declares Kay, when Dan is not around to disagree.

If he were, he would not call her his pet name for her: Missy. He would have to admonish her with a quiet "Please, Kay!"

45 kinds, native to Florida

A sign in the office says: BANG HEAD HERE.

"If there's a mistake to be made, we've made it," Dan says.

One mistake was trying to grow monarch butterflies on their own. They're the pretty red ones that migrate from Canada to Mexico, where they breed on a mountain.

\Lily Kossak, 3, studies the butterfly she’s going to release at Jonathan and Rebecca Smiths’ wedding near Ocala. The butterflies are shipped in an ice chest. The cold makes them sleep until each envelope is removed and opened.

Monarchs, like all butterflies, lay eggs on specific plants. In the monarch's case, the favored plant is milkweed. When the egg hatches, a caterpillar emerges. A handful of monarch caterpillars is capable of eating a milkweed plant all the way to the ground.

The Greathouses went through hundreds of milkweed plants before they decided to buy monarch pupae from another source. This is no science lesson, but when a caterpillar finishes gorging, it glues itself to something and turns into a pupa. A pupa is a hard-shelled thing. Inside, the caterpillar finishes the metamorphosis. When it breaks out, it's a mature butterfly and almost panting for sex.

The Greathouses raise 45 kinds of butterflies. They all are native to Florida, and most are native to other states. They have to have permits to release them outside of the state.

They raise most of their butterflies from scratch. That means they first have to have the right plants in the greenhouse to feed them. Dan loves the greenhouse. He can talk about his plants until a visitor's eyes glaze over.

"Didn't I tell you? Dan is real serious," Kay says. "He's upright."

Jonathan and Rebecca released 44 butterflies from the Greathouse farm after they said their vows. At least, they tried to release them; one seems content, for the moment, to stay with Rebecca.

"Please, Kay!" Dan says with attempted dignity.

He explains that pipevine swallowtails lay eggs on dutchman's pipe. The American eastern swallowtail lays eggs on the water hemlock. The malachite butterfly requires a tasty strangler fig.

When caterpillars are finished chowing down and turn into pupae, the Greathouses gather them up and keep them warm indoors. When critters emerge as butterflies, they are released in one of the 16 screened rooms. That's where Kay catches them to fill orders.

Each butterfly goes into a special porous envelope. The envelopes go into a chest with an ice pack. The cold puts the butterfly to sleep. At the museum, or at a wedding, the envelope is removed from the ice chest and opened. Waking, the butterfly flexes its wings. Then it flies off nice and pretty.

The Greathouses have some hoity-toity customers. Commercial photographers buy butterflies to release during fashion shoots for Glamour magazine. A movie producer calls -- how about sending a couple dozen to Hollywood? Butterflies received no screen credit in Oprah Winfrey's Beloved or the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but the Greathouses noticed their progeny anyhow.

They almost shudder when speaking about the X-Files debacle.

"We're in the butterfly business, but they wanted spiders," Dan says. Kay excused herself when Dan and helpers began exploring attics and musty barns for eight-legged prey. "Actually, I'm not a big fan of spiders myself," Dan says.

The script called for a big spider to crawl out of a shoe. The horrified owner of the shoe was supposed to pick up the shoe and brain the spider.

Even spiders have a lobby these days. No living spider could be killed in the name of art. The Greathouses received a frantic call. Now Hollywood needed a new supply of dead spiders.

"We thought if we did the spider work we'd get our foot in the door," Dan says. But alas, pretty butterflies are too tame for cutting edge sci-fi.

Heart and soul

"It's an interesting way to make a buck," Kay says. When the Greathouses began, Kay worked for free. Now she has a salary and insists on taking every Friday off. "Can't work with Dan every day," she jokes. "I'd go crazy."

If her husband is the fellow who keeps everything on schedule, and her brother-in-law the serious scientist, she is the heart and soul of the Greathouse Butterfly Farm. She likes money as much as the next person, but she believes butterflies have a higher purpose in life than profit. They are more like angels than insects.

The saddest day of Kay's life was March 1, 1999. Her mother, Mary Bess Harrell, shut her eyes for the last time. With her bad heart, she was too tired to go on.

At the graveyard, after the burial, Kay took out an envelope. The monarch butterfly needed a moment to warm. Then it opened and closed its wings for practice and flew off into the oaks.

"I know this sounds strange," Kay says. "But it was like my mother and her poor broken body just turned into that butterfly and flew off, all healed."

Kay shivers. Points to her arms.

Goose bumps.

For information about the Greathouse Butterfly Farm, call toll-free 1-866-475-2088; e-mail greathousebfi@mindspring.com; or see the Web site, www.greathousebutterflies.com.

Jeff Klinkenberg's e-mail address is klink@sptimes.com.

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