Lus Adler
@lusadler
Looking forward to traveling more w my hubs. But in the meantime, I’m here to remind you to take care of yourself and keep learning.
I get it. I’m hooked. I have a butterfly seed mix and wow. This one came up.
Fellow butterfly lovers, we have success! I’ve been trying to help out the Monarch butterflies and get their eggs to a safe harbor. And voila!
Here are some already up top. They are going to be there for 10 to 14 days. I have one that could possibly hatch into a butterfly on Sunday.
These caterpillars are ready to go up top to hang soon. They don’t get much bigger than this.
Important monarch caterpillar tip: take the big ones off of the milkweed and give them veggies. They love it. Save the milkweed leaves for the tiny ones.
Correction: looks like the monarch caterpillars DO like the milkweed seeds.
Follow up: I found this happy guy eating the seeds of the milkweed. It’s not a monarch caterpillar. They don’t care about the seeds, just the leaves and flowers. I did a search and it could be a moth caterpillar.
Question, Monarch butterfly people: do the caterpillars prefer flowers and seed pods to just leaves? Also, do they prefer the taste of the narrow leaf milkweed leaves to the tropical milkweed leaves?
Well, I did this job. It’s teak patio furniture. 29 years outside. Shocking amount of sludge I scrubbed off of them. Vinegar, soap, and water.
The caterpillar tent is keeping them safe. One of them got a lot bigger last night.
The lizards are very inquisitive but so far they are more interested in getting sun than checking out the new setup.
So I carefully took the one caterpillar (the other one got eaten last night either by a lizard or a bird) and moved him over to the bushy plant and covered the plant with one of those mesh laundry baskets.
Update: They ate one whole milkweed plant. Luckily I had another more bushy plant.
Look at Greenland in this model from: IS THE ATLANTIC OVERTURNING CIRCULATION APPROACHING A TIPPING POINT? By Stefan Rahmstorf
