Could two butterflies, carry a cloth handkerchief?(Details.)

~Depends are they African or European butterflies?

No idea. In the movie, they are blue, but not very big.

For the sake of discussion, it could be any butterfly.

A cloth handkerchief, is pretty heavy, I would think, for a butterfly. They aren’t designed to carry anything.

We have dragonflies around here, that could do it.

I don’t know about a couple of butterflies…

I did see that movie and there was more about that illusion than just the butterflies carrying a handkerchief. Can a butterfly carry the weight? Probably not. They can carry only very light loads…less than 0.1g. But beyond that flaw in the trick, could you train butterflies to carry something? No. Could you train butterflies to fly in a straight line, side by side? No. Could you train butterflies to fly to a specific person in a crowd? No. That portion of the trick was the conclusion where he returned a handkerchief to a woman in the audience who was sure it was still in the box in her lap.

It’s not the weigh, per se. An opened handkerchief would encounter wind resistance (i.e. the hankie would hit air, which would slow it down, like a sail on a sailboat). And the butterflies would not have the strength to overcome the wind resistance.

By math calculations, one might answer yes.
Butterflies can carry up to 40 times its own weight. A monarch butterfly typically weighs around 0.5 grams. A cloth napkin might weight 20grams.

@elbanditoroso Drag from air is a fraction of the acceleration on the object. It slows acceleration and limits speed, but it’s not capable of entirely preventing anything from moving in air, unless the object is being held by some other force.

I just weighed one of my glasses cleaning cloths, which clocked in at 12 grams. No way a butterfly will lift that. And we are talking about aerodynamic lift, not carry weight when walking.
According to this document: https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/130/1/235/5237/Maximum-Lift-Production-During-Takeoff-in-Flying#16419331
the average lift-force per body weight for butterflies is 72 Newton/kg.
If I am doing the conversions correctly, that comes out to 3.6 gram of take-off lift for a 0.5 gram butterfly.
So it would take at least 4 of them to lift that cloth.

@RedDeerGuy1 They could grip it by the seam.