Rearing Monarch Caterpillars - My Summertime Passion - by Sunscape

Every year I eagerly await the arrival of the beautiful Monarch butterflies. I have a nice-sized patch of Milkweed that I let grow just for them. Once I see them visiting the milkweed, I start to gather the tiny white eggs they deposit on the undersides of the leaves.

Each leaf with an egg deposited upon it is cut off and put into a floral tube. Usually within three days, the egg hatches. The baby caterpillar is barely visible at this point.

I shared this photo in a previous post earlier in the week. It shows how small they are in the first few days. But it does not take them too long before they really start to double in size.

The first thing I do every morning is go out and cut fresh leaves for them. Once they get to the third instar stage, they often go through an entire leaf in one day. Sometimes I have to give them second ones before I go to bed.

You can see in this photo how little was left in the morning. They literally devoured the entire leaf and stem. They were on top of the tubes resting since there was little to eat.

I had to coax them off the tubes with fresh leaves, which was a bit challenging.

I finally got them all onto large new leaves and back into the enclosure for another day.

If you look closely at the bottom right leaf, you can see a white dot, which is a new egg I found. I put that leaf into a separate cage so the caterpillars would not eat it by mistake.

Can you judge their size by the scale of my fingers? They are almost ready to go into the final stage.

When they are this large, I put them into a different style cage. It has a grid which is easy for them to build their webs on. Then they will hang in a J formation and shed their outer skin.

These four caterpillars did so, and I gathered them from the bottom of the cage just to show you.

Later that day and overnight, all four of them had transformed into their cocoons.

I thought I had another day with the fifth caterpillar, but he decided he was ready and climbed to the top of the netted cage and formed a J before I could transfer him over. I guess he decided to be alone, lol.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing my little creatures going through the different instar stages. I will keep you posted in about 10 days when they begin to transform into a beautiful butterfly. That is an exciting thing to watch. Stay tuned!