raise butterflies

The last of the butterflies has eclosed out of the chrysalis. I have lost count, but I think it’s about 154 monarchs now.

I am all done. There are no more eggs, larvae, pupae or live butterflies in my house.

I have a large number of butterfly road kill which I’m going to frame in stained glass.

Thursday, August 02, 2007
8:45 PM

I asked Alida to count the chrysalis remains on the hangers and in the jars and on screens and leaves.

I then added 10 for the ones that appeared from nowhere…I never did figure out where they had come from!

So her total was 128, but then the final total is 138.

I thought we’d only raised about 100. This is quite exciting!

I have a question now. Why do butterflies gravitate to the highway?
Now, my hypotheses.

1. The pavement is warm and draws them.

2. because the pavement is warm air rises and therefore sucks the air from the fields on either side of the pavement inward toward it.

3. monarchs are generally flowing in one direction. When they arrive at the highway, they have to cross it. However, the traffic moving in one direction, but not filling the road on both sides at once, causes the air currents to swirl behind the stream of traffic. When opposing traffic streams past that stream, it spins the air in the other direction. The result is monarchs can’t fly across the road.

4. the monarchs are attracted to the milkweed along the edge of the road. The air currents pull them away from the attraction and spin them all over above the road until they are inevitably hit by cars.

5. because monarchs are generally flying low, looking for milkweed to lay eggs on or flowers to drink nectar from, they get in the way of the flow of traffic and are hit.

tuesday, July 31, 2007
3:16 PM

Let me just cogitate on my day so far. I will have to write about the adventure of picking up about a hundred dead monarch butterflies along the roadside, as well as watching helplessly as they flew about above and between heavy traffic while it hit them.

It was devastating. I felt I should be there with a butterfly net catching them and taking them to a safe place.

But instead I spent three hours picking up ones that had already been hit and blown to the shoulders and into the grass. I filled a small cereal box and the book of mormon with them. The ones that were brittle went in the box. The ones that were flexible went between pages in the book which was the only thing I had to press them in.

I also collected the ones that were stunned and put them in a shopping bag to recover and be let out at home.

Later I’ll take all these butterfflies and press them between layers of glass to make stained glass butterflies. I must have dozens of them.

I’ve been thinking about the pattern of the monarchs. I think they lay eggs in an area and then move on to another and another and another. That would make sense because they don’t want to overpopulate one area of plants. If that is the case, then it would account for why we don’t see many of our own monarchs at home.

Monarchs get hit by cars because they are flying low across or along the road.

I have to count up the numbers. I haven’t done that lately. I know that all the monarchs in the first group of eggs and larvae I collected have now hatched out. I had it planned so that I did not collect any more after a month before I was going to California with Alida.

July 21, 2007
12:52 pm

One of my hangers with a row of unopened pupae was on the gground.

The wind was blowing, so it must have knocked it off I hung it back up but two pupae had fallen off. I had no way to rehook one of them, so I made a cone out of a piece of paper and then slid it in so it sticks halfway out. I am quite pleased with my choice.

Saturday, July 21, 2007
1:30 am

I looked at the green pupae hanging from the screen squares I’ve safety pinned to the hangers on the southwest wall of the living room.

Most of them are black! It appears to me that 13 of the caterpillars in those pupae will come out as butterflies (eclose) tomorrow.

It looks like that’s most of them, now. It’s amazing how many are eclosing in a day. Many days have been ten a day.

July 20, 2007
2 pm

Ten more butterflies eclosed. One was from the side of the mug, one from in a jar and the other eight were hanging from screen from hangers over the sunroom door.

On the way home later tonight I brought in a large milkweed and put it in the vase with the existing big one.

I put some more tiny hatchlings from my egg dishes onto leaves.

that was the wrong photo

The pupae on the side of the spice container and the one hanging under the cupboard above the counter have both emerged, I mean eclosed, now.