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From ба́бка(bábka, “grandmother, old woman”) + -ка(-ka), originally a diminutive; from the folk belief that spirits of the dead live on as butterflies.
Russian does not divide butterflies and moths the same way English does. Russian has мотылёк(motyljók) for a kind of small moth that swarms at night, and моль(molʹ) for the moth that eats clothes, but the other moths are all ба́бочки(bábočki).
Vasmer, Max (1964–1973) “бабочка”, in Oleg Trubachyov, transl., Этимологический словарь русского языка [Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language] (in Russian), Moscow: Progress
