A new Monarch butterfly! 🦋 as some of you know, we have been working on building some Monarch habitat. Lots of milkweed for the caterpillars but also nectar for the adults. The adults seem to really like Joe Pye Weed.
We brought this Monarch's caterpillar inside and kept it in a "butterfly house" until it made it's chrysalis. According to this website https://butterfly-fun-facts.com/only-1-or-2-butterfly-eggs-out-of-100-live-to-become-adult-butterflies/ only 1% or 2% of butterfly eggs make it to adulthood. Protection from predators greatly increase those odds 🙂
Our new butterfly hung out for a couple of hours drying its wings before flying away. We propped the milkweed it made its chyrsalis on up on some goldenrod until it dryed out. If you look closely in the first photo, you can actually see the empty chrysalis.
Here's a fun collage of the chrysalis 😍 The chrysalis starts out green with some crazy gold looking accents. https://monarchjointventure.org/faq/chrysalis-gold-dots There are many theories on the reason for the gold dots. The chyrsalis turns translucent before the butterfly emerges. We currently have two more chrysalis and 4 other caterpillars 😁 so you can probably expect more pictures. Its crazy. We keep bringing in more fresh milkweed to feed our caterpillar and then the next day its like "Wait! there's another tiny caterpillar!" 🐛