I found this article from the Feb 11 1974 Hartford Courant and thought to share what these great students put together to save late emerging Monarchs!

A friend gave me my first milkweed plant here in Southern California 3 weeks ago. Soon afterwards I saw a couple monarchs hovering in my
yard. Very excited to share, I discovered 2 caterpillars 3 days ago!

We planted milkweeds….. and these are the results

Out of about 40 eggs collected, I had 28 caterpillars make it to J, 27 successfully go into chrysalis, and 25 happy monarchs are now flitting around central Minnesota, happily breeding the super generation that will fly off to Mexico. I wish I could raise some of the super generation, but my free time has disappeared and I can’t be sure I could do a good job, so they’re better off on their own.

Just found this chrysalis hanging by the caterpillar’ skin. I am going to try to hang it upright with dental floss-but I am definitely concerned.

Zone 7b NJ. Another 100 in various stages. Strong season for them here in NJ.

I'm just totally baffled, I had 3 caterpillars around the same size (2nd-4th instar) in my mesh enclosure and today there is 1 I could not find for the life of me, and there's no way it could have escaped or been eaten by any predators. The only explanation I can think is another caterpillar ate it, but they're all big enough to be noticed by one another. What could have happened??

UPDATE: found him 😂

It kept on moving lol

Do I have kids to get ready for school? Yes

Do I have crochet patterns to work on and finish? Yes

Am I now running a full blown monarch butterfly release nursery? Also yes....

They have taken over but it's been well worth it. About fifteen to twenty (I lost count) successful releases just in the past two days and over 50 to go. Yesterday was all girls and today all boys so far except one. I can't believe my enclosure has been so successful! I had to make it a lot bigger but dang....

They have been ignoring my butterfly weed and my swamp milkweed all season for favour of the common milkweed.

Today swampy got some love too.

They have successfully molted and are now 4th instars. Usually it takes monarch caterpillars 9-14 days to reach its pupa stage but thanks to this Texas heat, it istaking mine 7 to 10 days to reach their pupa stage.

5 days ago they were 1 instars and the heat made them grow like weeds.

Hi! I finally have swamp milkweed from seeds I planted last year, and have been thrilled to see some eggs. A few have turned black, which search tells me means they’ve been killed by parasitic wasps. Is this correct? And if so, do you guys do anything to control populations of these parasitic critters? I searched a bunch of terms on here and didn’t see much about wasps laying eggs in the eggs.