Status as of August 9, 2007

We have about 50 monarch larvae and another 40 black swallowtail larvae growing like mad. They should be "J"ing up and forming pupae in the next day or two. It is just unbelievable, for even me, to see how much they eat! They just devour plants. The monarchs will eat all the leaves off a 5 gallon bucket of milkweed in a day. These plants that I have been growing since the middle of March disappear in a day...

With the next generation of both monarchs and swallowtails, I will be out of plants that I have grown for their consumption. I will have to revert to using fresh cut, wild plants. This is what I have done in prior years and works fine, but is time consuming and fussy. We have also deduced that the larvae don't quite grow as big on cut milkweed as they do on live plants. Guess I will have to devote more greenhouse space to butterflies next year!

So far we have tagged and released 11 monarchs. Pictures tomorrow I promise!

What is going on!

We tagged and released the first 5 monarchs today from the greenhouse... there are 5 more that we can probably do tonight. Egg laying is going fine and the next batch of caterpillers are starting to hatch from their eggs.

Black Swallowtail larvae are growing like crazy and will soon start making their pupae.

Tags came from Monarchwatch!

Good day! The tags we will be using to tag the monarchs before release have arrived! You can read all about them at www.monarchwatch.com ... this is a great source of info about monarchs as well! We will begin tagging all monarchs released, or just caught hanging around, this weekend.

A number more of the pupae emerged to monarchs today. I have paired off a number of the hatchlings from earlier in the week and contained them in the breeding boxes. Hopefully egg laying will begin shortly.

The black swallowtails have had a huge growth spirt! They are eating parsley plants down to the nub!

I discovered another group of small monarch larvae today in one of the breeding boxes... so there must have been some egg laying earlier than I expected on the last batch.

All for now...

Big day in the butterfly house

Golly, big day in the butterfly house today... we had 7 monarchs emerge.

The two females I contained in the breeding box we also very productive, so we had 20 or 30 more eggs on the milkweed plants. We will watch them carefully. They should hatch in 10 days or so.

The black swallowtail larvae continue to grow. Some are reaching the second phase of their growth were they start to look a little different... I will try to get a picture of that.

Anyway, here is a picture of the pin up board where the monarchs are emerging from