Each school break I ask the kids what special thing they would like to do all by themselves with me (no other siblings or friends or Dad). This Summer Caty chose a trip to the mall and a cafe, Ben chose a trip to the bowling alley, but Maggie wanted to grow monarchs. Somehow she remembered that at Ben's kindergarten last summer they had caterpillars that turned into monarchs. She wanted her own.
I have to say that I was most excited about Maggie's idea.
We went to the hardware store by ourselves and bought some milkweed plants (here they call them Swan Plant). We filled the pots with soil and planted the milkweed and Maggie watered them. I didn't know how successful this project would be since we were at the mercy of nature. We needed a monarch to find the milkweed and lay an egg.
Little did I know it would be so easy. With in a day Maggie and I witnessed a monarch flutter down and then curl up and start laying eggs. We could stand very close and see it all happening! But by the time I had the presence of mind to fetch the camera, that butterfly was gone. I tried to get pics of other butterflies laying eggs but they were all blurry. Anyway, we had DOZENS of butterflies arrive to lay eggs! The pic above is just the first butterfly's efforts. The tiny white dots are the eggs.
Soon, the eggs were hatching. Here you can see a tiny caterpillar and some other eggs. But butterflies kept arriving and laying more eggs.
Maggie, with her milkweed plants.
The first caterpillars were already getting big after a few days.
They were eating machines. They don't even stop eating to poop, observed Margaret.
The milkweed great like crazy too. Maggie watered every day and we spent lots of time looking at the caterpillars and holding them, much to their annoyance, I'm sure. One went AWOL onto the patio and got stepped on.
It became a fun thing to do: Let's go check on the caterpillars! And I found myself wandering out there by myself more than once. It was kind of exciting to have been so successful in raising caterpillars.
However, as the little buggers got bigger and bigger and the milkweed got smaller and smaller, I thought maybe we needed more milkweed plants. So, off to the hardware store for more.
We looked and looked for swan plants but every store in town was out! What to do?! One of the teachers at Maggie's school had some milk weed plants in the classroom and only one caterpillar. So we took 5 of our big ones over to the school. But we still needed to find more food.
It turns out that pumpkin can be fed to caterpillars that have finished their 5th molt (or instar). So off to the grocery we went for some pumpkin. And they wouldn't eat it until there wasn't anything left of the milkweed. But then they became fans of the pumpkin (which doesn't have the chemicals they need for metamorphosis but by the time they're this old, they don't need them any more). So we lost the littlest caterpillars but there wasn't anything else we could do.
All the same, the big ones had a feast.
Soon they were going walkabout all over the back yard and side of the house. Then they were all gone and we went on the hunt for their cocoons (which are really called a chrysalis). Maggie loves to say chrysalis and it sounds so cute when she does. We watched the chrysalides (pronounced: kri-sal-a-dees) for weeks without seeing any changes.
Then one day...
...we started to see through the chrysalises (which is what the kids called the plural).
Then we knew it was only a day or so when they looked like this.
The first butterfly was named Jake (Maggie named it after the dog in the cartoon Adventure Time.) It's a boy because of the black spots in the orange section of the bottom wings. It hatched and ended up on the hose sitting on the patio. Erik says he nearly stepped on it! Lucky for him, he didn't!
This is what the empty chrysalis looked like.
It was incredibly thin but must have been very strong because it survived the elements. And we had a 100 year rain event and gale force winds a week before it hatched.
Everyone got to check out Jake and hold him while he dried the outside of his wings and pumped them full of fluid on the inside.
Maggie had to get out of her bath to see Jake.
The next morning we found another one. This time, on the tomato plant. This one is Finn (after the boy in Adventure Time) but she's a girl. Maybe she'll come back next Summer and lay her own eggs.
Maggie loved holding Finn too. She was better at it the second time.
Poor old Finn had to be handled for a while before we left him to it.
Finally he decided he was done and started to flap so we put him back.
You can see the sticks of milkweed left in the pot to the right. They are still recovering. But they'll be bigger next year so there will be lots more caterpillars to feed.
Maggie's Summer fun lasted 10 weeks. What a great project for her to have done. We'll definately have to do it again next Summer.
