Monarch Time

What a day we had yesterday. I waited until yesterday morning to tell Lina that I had to pick her up from school for a doctor's appointment - one she had been dreading - to get her needles updated. Anyway, we got over that one, the amazing part was that when we were exiting the building we saw a Monarch fluttering around the parking lot and before our eyes it proceeded to land on a little milkweed plant sticking out from between the brick walls of the building and the asphalt and lay an egg! Well, we were amazed. In the 4 or 5 years that Lina has been raising Monarchs in the spring we have never had the good fortune to happen upon that wonderful event. We gather caterpillars in late spring and keep them in a huge jar we have. We feed them fresh milkweed daily and watch them grow. Lina has been able to see them change into a chrysalis, emerge, pump blood into their wings and fly away many times. But we have never found any eggs.

Now that we know this is the right time for them, we stopped on our way home and found 3! And more wonders, this morning when we got up one had hatched and shortly after a 2nd one hatched in front of us! The third one is still in it’s egg.


Here's the container we put the leaves in last night. I had no idea when they would hatch and I didn't want the leaves to shrivel up and dry out so I put them on some moist paper towels. in the picture there is two hatch caterpillars and one egg.


Close up of the remaining egg


Here's one of the little guys, can you see it's Monarch markings?

Here it is against a ruler. Those are millimetres!

So we were able to watch the tiny caterpillars under a magnifying glass. There really tiny, if you look at the photo with the ruler, those are millimetres, so he is under an eight of an inch in size. Lina has started a journal and we will be watching them every day.