Monarchs

I started this post about 2 weeks ago but never finished it or posted it. Better late than never...

Danielle and I enjoy watching the whole monarch life cycle in our little garden.We've been fortunate to have more monarch activity in our milkweed this summer than we've had the past couple years. Hopefully we'll have some eggs that successfully make it to butterflies.

We saw this female laying eggs in our milkweed earlier this week. (She's resting on a cardinal flower in the first picture.) She was very faded and tattered. I'm glad she found our milkweed before her time was up.  Danielle was laying by the milkweed looking for eggs when the monarch landed on a leaf right beside her head and laid one.

 

 

Monarch eggs

I didn't have time to water the plants last night, so I did that first thing this morning. There are a couple eggs that are easy to find, and I always check on them. Today I checked at just the right time. We were able to watch one caterpillar hatch from its egg. They eat their egg shell after they hatch and then start on the leaves.

Caterpillar we found a few weeks ago. We brought him inside so he'd have a better chance of survival. I'm convinced the mosquito fogging harms them.

 

 

Here he is "in position".

He successfully made his chrysalis. I think they are so pretty.

This is how his chrysalis looks today. He should eclose tomorrow or the next day.

 

 

She eclosed the next day but I got busy with softball and vacation and never finished my post.

Drying her wings

We released her later the same day. She rested on our lantana for a minute and then took off to explore the world.

As we released her, we saw another monarch in our milkweed plants. We have had a lot of eggs and caterpillars. At one point we brought 20 tiny caterpillars in the house to increase the odds that some of them would survive. We currently have 6 that are almost ready to make their chrysalises. I'll post more pictures of those later.