Just a couple pieces of interesting news that I don’t think I have posted before. Did you know Butterflies live on the Space Station? Well they don’t yet, but they will (hopefully). On the Shuttle that launched on Monday, November 16, 2009, they took two types of Butterfly Caterpillars to be dropped off at the...
Category Archives: Caterpillars Got up early this morning since the sun was finally out. Found a few Monarch Caterpillars and a Queen Caterpillar. I haven’t seen the Queen’s flying around, but have seen the Monarchs. Larger size of a different Monarch Caterpillar. And here’s the Queen Caterpillar  I put this in my response to Valerie, but I thought I would post it as well. We just had a strange occurrence happen that we’ve never experienced before, at least not at this high of ratio. Leecy and I took in about 7 Monarch Caterpillars about a week ago. Only 2 of them made...  Look what we gathered up today (and yesterday as well)! Our first batch of Monarch Caterpillars suddenly appeared. It’s still a little early for the big migration (I think that should be around October), but we apparently have some Monarchs who are laying eggs. Today I was reading some posts in one of the Butterfly...  I mentioned before that we have about 50 Monarch caterpillars. Well, now we only have around 5 caterpillars. The remaining have all turned into seemingly healthy Chrysalis. Besides their birth, Monarchs have significant developmental challenges at their other stages of development. Going from an egg to a caterpillar, then caterpillar to Chrysalis, then Chrysalis to...  Octomom would have nothing on Timothia. Right now we have about 20 Monarch chrysalis, with several more chomping away at the milkweed. Fortunately, we have enough milkweed (I hope) so that all of our current caterpillars have a chance to become full-fledged Monarch butterflies.  The monarch caterpillars destroyed my current crop of milkweed. Fortunately Joshua’s had 18 one gallon milkweed plants in stock. We cleaned him out. Hopefully this will last until at least the weekend. The image below is just one plant, and just at the top of the plant. We’ve been able to count over 50 caterpillars...  Okay, so I probably have about 60 or so milkweed plants for Monarchs which you might think would suffice quite well while most of the Monarchs are migrating north. As usual, that thinking has got me into trouble. I mentioned in an earlier post about how we quarantined “some” of the eggs from Timothia, and... |
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