Monarch butterflies

My awesome friend, Sandy F, got me hooked into the wonderful world of monarch butterflies. In no time, we identified all the milkweed near us, found a single egg and a 2-day old caterpillar. We soon added 4 more caterpillars of various ages to our menagerie.

Once we started looking for milkweed and caterpillars we were amazed at how many there are around here! Learning about their lifecycle was nothing short of incredible--in 2 weeks they go from an egg that you can hardly see to a 2"-long fatty caterpillar that splits it's last skin and forms an incredible green chrysalis with gold jewel-like trim. 

Then in 8-9 days that green chrysalis turns dark and then clear and then, pop! Out pops a beautiful butterfly!

 

Out of our 6 caterpillars we had 5 hatch into beautiful butterflies, only one of which was a male--and he was much bigger than the females! Their names were Radiance (RIP), Milky (aka Turkey), Sven, Stripey, Engbuhlite (aka Olaf), and Marshmallow. It was a magical 5 week discovery--with every new caterpillar we learned a little more about their life cycle. Maybe wherever we move next will be in the monarch's migration route--we sure hope so!!