Finally, a Monarch!

Two years ago for Christmas Aunt Kara gave the kids a butterfly house. With the house, which is a net-like cylinder, came a card and instructions to fill out and send in the card to receive monarch caterpillars and the food with which to feed them. Shortly after having received this wonderful gift, I discovered that one of the girls had eaten the card (Yes, our girls eat paper). No sweat I decided, we have plenty of milkweed in our yard, we will just collect the caterpillars off the milkweed in the summer, feed them milkweed and voila! monarchs, right? Wrong. I searched and searched, but to no avail. Not a monarch caterpillar in sight. While digging for the garden in the spring we discovered several moth pupa and put them in the house. We did enjoy watching them wiggle and hatch. In the fall, we came across many wooly worms which we also put in the house and enjoyed as they metamorphed into cocoons and then moths. But still no butterflies. So this summer I was determined to find a monarch in some form or another. As it so happens, while we were down in Florida visiting Aunt Kara, there were monarch caterpillars devouring her milkweed plant. Would you believe, we actually put two of them in a plastic container and drove them all the way from Fort Lauderdale back to Virginia. When we arrived home there was only one left, but that's better than none. Now, I would have loved to have put the little guy straight into the butterfly house, but over the last year and a half, the house had developed a hole in it (thanks to our cat). I had to settle for putting the caterpillar outside on our milkweed in hopes to find his crysallis later. Periodically, I searched, but with no luck until finally one day when I was working in the yard I found this... Isn't it beautiful! And not three feet away was a second one. Naturally I collected them both and carefully moved them to the butterfly house. We weren't sure how long it would take, but a couple weeks later the first butterfly hatched. About a week later, so did the second one.

Here is one of the monarchs in the butterfly house, drying his wings.

We didn't get to see either of them come out of their crysallis, but we thoroughly enjoyed it just the same. We let them go as soon as their wings were dry and we love to watch for monarchs flying in the yard and wonder if they are ours.