First Butterfly Release

On Monday, August 11, we released over 300 monarchs from the butterfly house! What a truly awesome sight!

Tagging Monarchs

Shoot, I forgot...

Last year we tagged about 100 monarch butterflies we raised at the butterfly house. These tags are created and distributed by a great organization MonarchWatch... their website is www.monarchwatch.org. The migrating monarchs are tagged and if the butterfly makes it to central Mexico to overwinter, tags are collected by the locals. So, for the 2007 year, over 100,000 tags were created, just under 100,000 were distributed to the public, just over 600 were recovered in Mexico in March 2008. Of the 600, 329 were for the 2007... the balance from prior years. Of the 329 tags recovered from the 2007 year, TWO came from our butterfly house! How about that!

J

2008 Season

It seems impossible that the last entry I made in this blog was last August! Time just flies by...

Well we have a new butterfly season upon us. We have the first groups of monarchs and black swallowtails in the butterfly house... the females are busy laying eggs... we will have lots of adults to release as the season goes along.

Let's catch up with what has gone on this season already, that I did not have time to write about. Last season, we raised a number of cecropia moth larvae to the point they formed cocoons; we wintered them over in a cold basement. This spring, we put them in the greenhouse and by the end of May, all had emerged. We put the females in an old bird cage and let the males go in the greenhouse. Within a week, they began laying eggs... which are now hatching and feeding on a crab apple tree in our yard. We have them in a protective sleeve, so the predators won't get them. The adult moths only live for 10-14 days, then they die... kind of sad to see when you have spent so much time and effort raising them. Oh well...

My intent this year is to chronical the life of the butterflies with pictures... trying to take shots at every stage of development and to post the pics here at the blog. Hopefully, time with permit this to happen.

Final thought tonight... remember the butterfly house at Cayuga Nature Center. It is a great stopping point on your way north on Rt 89. They have created a wonderful community resource and we need to support it... and them. More on that later.

J

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