Raising Monarchs...Sort Of

I feel like all I talk abut if monarchs and caterpillars, but apparently I'm really into them these days.  As you saw on Friday, they have made it into the house.

A few weeks ago we decided to bring a few caterpillars into the house so we could watch them.  I don't have a nifty butterfly house, so we improvised.  We will be getting one in the future. I added it to my Christmas list on Pintrest today.

These containers will eventually become more terrariums, but they did the job this year.  We moved six caterpillars at first.  At first they all seemed to do well.  A few days in however, we had one make a chrysalis that seemed too small.  Within a day it was clear that something was wrong with this particular butterfly.  Fortunately the rest did well.

It is hard to get good pictures through the glass, but I managed to get a few that weren't horrible.  Caterpillars basically eat a ton of leaves and get larger and larger, molting along the way.  Eventually they are ready to pupate and make a "hanging j".  In our house they spent about a day this way before they turned into the jade green chrysalis we are all so familiar with.

This weekend we had our first butterfly emerge.  We were so excited for our Monarch, but as it turns out, we had raised a Queen instead.  After a bit of googling, we now know that they are very similar looking when they are caterpillars and chrysalises.

We put it outside Saturday morning since it was pouring rain and dark when it was ready to go outside on Friday night.  We checked on it a few times and eventually it had fluttered off to the zinnias in the backyard.  Or at least that's the story we are telling ourselves since it was gone and there was a Queen in the backyard.

Sunday morning we woke up to another chrysalis that had become clear and we knew our second butterfly was on its way.  This time it was indeed a monarch.  We put it out onto the lantana on the pollinator garden just like the Queen the day before.

We have five more chrysalises left.  If you are noticing the math isn't adding up that would be due to another two caterpillars sneaking inside during the "we need to eat all the milkweed" stage.  Even with rinseing the leaves off and checking them for aphids, they made it in undetected.  A few others were returned to the garden.

I think we have at least one more Queen in there and I feel confident that two are Monarchs due to their size.  The rest should eclose this week,except for the last rouge caterpillar that just formed it's chrysalis yesterday.  It should be with us for 1-2 weeks.

The only other time I've raised butterflies was for work.  They ate artificial diet and lived in these weird little plastic containers until the pupated.  This time was certainly more fun and I think we will do it again, but there are a few things I would like to do differently.

• I want one of those butterfly mesh tent things.  The glass containers are lovely, but definitely not designed for this type of project.  Butterflies like airflow and these don't really provide for that.  They are also a pain to clean our since they open from the top.

• I kept my milkweed in mason jars that had open tops.  I think next time I would like to use water picks.  The water gets pretty nasty with caterpillar frass over the course of a day.

• We used paper towels in the bottoms to help with clean-up, but with a tent I plan to use some newsprint instead.  I changed the paper towels a lot more often that I thought I would.

• Caterpillars don't pupate where you want them to.  I had one pupate on a leave (luckily his friends didn't eat it before I moved him).  A few pupated on the fabric and the side of the jar.  Next time I want to add a few sticks to the whole set up to ensure that the butterflies have sturdy structures while they get their wings ready.

Anyone else raised butterflies this year?