We have been raising some very hungry caterpillars into monarch butterflies for the last few weeks. Great Aunt Carol and I caught the caterpillars and we have them hatching in a mesh caterpillar environment. The girls enjoyed watching them at the caterpillar stage - they only eat milkweed so we had fun harvesting the leaves and feeding our friends.
We are now at the cocoon stage - we have two caterpillars of the four that have successfully made it into cocoons. We did have three, but Abby got really excited about the first one and ran, with the cage, to show me. That cocoon fell down and oozed a lot, so I'm not sure it will make it into a fully developed butterfly. But the two that are cocooning are changing - you can see the patterns in their wings through the cocoons. It has been a fun process to watch. And... we even had a little caterpillar hatch from an egg in the last few days. We took it out of the environment in our house and released it in a patch of milkweed in town, since we had used up all our picked milkweed and the other caterpillars had already cocooned. Now... the wait for butterflies is on :-)
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