I found this on non other than You Tube..  Very cool.  Even though I haven't been collecting my "cats" this year I still have a bunch on my milkweed.    This is a great video of how they turn into a chrysalis.

A must watch for anyone!!!

This is a great video on tagging and monarch migration

New York Times Video On Monarchs

One day I would like to go here to see where the Monarchs go.   This is really wild if you haven't seen pictures of migrating monarchs before.   

I wonder how many of my butterflies make it down to Mexico.    Maybe someone will find one of my tags that I tagged a monarch with.  Who knows...   

This weekend  I got to help out a friend that did some photography for this cool horse show.     It was so much fun spending the weekend watching and talking to horse people.     I am a "horse people want-a-be"    

I used to ride.   Dressage and hunter jumper.    I never got to be in the horse business as much as I wanted.  As a kid I would have loved to have been in a ton of horse shows and traveled all over the country with my horse and gone to different shows.    I have a 1st cousin that did all of that.  I just got to hear about it from her.   

I did show a little and I rode from the time I was 8 until I was 15.  At 15 I had a terrible horse accident.    I fell off  a horse at a horse show and broke my arm VERY bad.    Like two surgeries and in a cast for over  a year bad.     My parents told me my horse back riding days were over.  I wasn't able to really ride again until I moved to Massachusetts and found a great trainer that I got to work with in exchange for cleaning stalls on the weekends.     But I still have a dream of getting back into the riding world again and maybe one day showing.   I was hoping that Camille would be as horse crazy as I was as a kid... but no.  She likes horses but is not obsessed with them like I was at her age.     Maybe one day I will find a picture of my room as a child and scan it.   I had horses everywhere!

But this weekend I was at a Carriage Classic.    And it is so much fun to watch these beautiful horses pull a carriage.    Here are a few pictures that I took: 

This morning I got to tag and release my first butterfly.   It came out of the chrysalis last night so I put it outside this morning.   

Each tag that I have has a different number on it.    I record all the numbers that I put on each butterfly and send  all the data to Monarch Watch.  They go to Mexico and find the tag or butterfly and see if it made it all the way to it's migration place and where it started.   It is all pretty cool.   

I had another butterfly come out of it's chrysalis and had something wrong with it.    The wings would not unwrinkle.  So it could not fly.    So sad when this happens and last year in only happened once very late in the season.   

Poor little guy.  It can't even walk.   The wings get in the way of it's legs.    So I made a decision,  some of you that know me might be surprised, but I decided to teach the kids a lesson on the fit and the fittest in nature.    If this butterfly had been born in the wild it would have been eaten or just fell off the plant and died.    So the kids and I took the butterfly outside to our pet garden spider  and dropped it in the web.

Now Griffin thought that this was the coolest thing since instant oatmeal.   Camille and I felt bad for the butterfly but knew that the spider was pretty happy to be having  a nice big meal.   

This is life in nature.   

Everybody has to eat...  Now that poor butterfly had a purpose. 

So I had a pretty exciting weekend.    We did get a lot of orders over the weekend so tomorrow I will be doing a lot of proofs and printing of orders.     Back to the real world..    

I was looking through the archives  to see when the Monarchs came to visit last year.  And it was this time last year.   

  So I went outside yesterday and checked my milkweed.   

And sure enough I found 6 eggs.     Brought them in and this morning three have hatched.

These little guys are so small I had a hard time getting a good picture of them. They will grow so fast!!

This little guy is about 5 minutes old.    So sweet...  O.K.  so not everyone will think that... but I do! :)

Someone asked me how many Milkweed plants I have and that they pulled up the vine milkweed because they were told it would take over their yard.    

Well I guess I agree the vine could take over the yard  but not if you plan for it.   I have my milkweed growing on everything.     And I have  a lot of Tropical Milkweed this year that I grew from last years seeds.   So I should have enough to feed the caterpillars this year.  I ran out of Milkweed last year.      

This is Tropical Milkweed.   Isn't it pretty?   Monarchs love this plant and will lay eggs on it before they will lay eggs on the vine Milkweed.   

This is before I weeded  the bed. 

  My fence is full of vine milkweed.     The  honey bees and June bugs are loving the little white flowers that the vine milkweed are producing.  Last year's milkweed didn't have this many flowers.   

See.  Now isn't this weed beautiful?   Why would anyone want to pull it up??   

So stay tuned,  this is just the beginning my friends...      

It is official. I have been called the Butterfly Lady. I have been called worse. :) All I did was plant some milkweed and have some flowers and the Monarch butterflies have come.

Since the first day I found an egg, on July 26 up to today I have released 43 butterflies. Right now I have around 55 Chrysalis, 10 caterpillars and around 16 eggs hatched yesterday. I am getting close to running out of milkweed.

This is a caterpillar right before it turns into a chrysalis. (the "J" position)

The chrysalis right before the butterfly comes out.

The butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis and it's wings are still crunched up.

They will hang from the empty chrysalis most of the day until their wings dry and get strong enough to fly.

They are so beautiful hanging like this.

I have had so much fun seeing the Monarchs and collecting eggs this year. I hate to see it come to an end. But I do know that next year I will plant more milkweed and more flowers.

The greatest part about raising Monarch is giving my kids the oportunity to see how these beautiful butterflies grow. They have had a lot of fun too.

Way too long since my last post. So this will be an update on the Monarchs. So since my last post almost a month ago.... (again Wow!) I have collected and I am raising about 50 caterpillars. All of which I found on my milkweed plants.

You may be thinking who in their right mind would have that many caterpillars at one time. I may have been told one or two times in my life that I wasn't in my right mind... Any who Monarchs are very interesting and they need our help with their migration. So I have become a volunteer for The Monarch Larva Monitoring Project (MLMP) so I have a good excuse to have so many caterpillars. :) If you are interested in learning more go to the website or go to this one.
Monarch Watch

Camille has been my little helper. She helps me feed them and clean out the cages. She is learning a lot seeing them hatch out of the eggs and grow .

Right now we have 16 Chrysalis. Brian built me a butterfly box so the Chrysalis could be at the top and not be disturbed when I added new caterpillars on the bottom.

Last week I took all the caterpillars to Camille's 1st grade class and taught a little lesson on Monarchs and everyone got to see all the stages and learn why Monarchs are important . That was fun and I got to get back in the classroom for a short time. I left them with 10 caterpillars to grow in the classroom.

This a male Monarch visiting my milkweed.

Last year I only found 13 caterpillars and I thought that was a lot. This year if the females keep laying eggs I am going to have to find milkweed someplace else because I didn't grow enough. I will have to grow a lot more next year.