A few weeks ago, we released the last of our monarch butterflies, and I’ve been meaning to share my photos ever since. We had only four caterpillars this year. (Last time we had 19!) We think a few of the caterpillars may have been preyed upon by wasps (because we counted more eggs), so we didn’t hesitate to move these four into our mesh cage when we found them. Here’s our monarch summer in photos. Enjoy!
In August and September, we had a pretty amazing experience. It started because last spring, I tried planting some milkweed seeds. My plan was to grow a lot of milkweed, and then I would order some monarch larvae and try to raise them just like we did for painted ladies four years ago.
My ideas didn’t quite work out the way I planned. First of all, out of 150 seeds, less than ten milkweed plants grew. (I’m sure this has more to do with my yard’s growing conditions and my lack of a green thumb. I have a green pinky.) They also grew very slowly. Only a few of them got big, but they never blossomed.
One day while I was watering the milkweed, I noticed some holes in the leaves. When I turned over a leaf, there it was — a tiny monarch caterpillar!
When I searched, I found them all over the milkweed. We were so excited. There were almost 20 caterpillars. (Every time we tried to count, we got a different number. There were a lot of hiding places in the milkweed.)
They grew and grew. I wondered from the very beginning, if this little patch of milkweed would be enough for them, especially after they got big.
We had another worry too. Tropical Storm Irma was going to come through here. I noticed that a mere sprinkle of the hose to water the milkweed could knock down the caterpillars.
There was no way they were going to survive Tropical Storm Irma. We made the effort to put the big pots into our garage, and as the storm was passing, I was glad I did that. It was fierce. (But I am saddened to think about how much wildlife must have drowned in that storm.)
They continued to eat and eat, grow and grow, and poop and poop. Just like caterpillars are supposed to do. It was quite amazing to watch.
We were clearly going to run out of milkweed, so I asked around for help. Someone on Twitter sent me an article saying that if the caterpillars are in their 5th instar, they will eat pumpkin and cucumber. So we bought some pumpkin and cucumber and put it in the pots, giving them a way to climb up, just like on the milkweed. At first they didn’t eat the alternate food, but by the next day, the milkweed was gone, and they were eating it! We were so relieved.
Not long after this, we noticed some of the caterpillars began leaving the pots. We knew they were probably going out to try to find a place to pupate. We decided to keep a few in our butterfly cage. I wanted the boys to be able to watch the metamorphosis, especially my eight-year-old, who doesn’t remember raising the painted ladies. I also wanted to give a few of the caterpillars some extra protection. I put seven caterpillars in the cage, and let the other ones go on their own.
When caterpillars are ready to pupate, they find a good place to attach themselves to with a silky thread and hang upside down in this J shape. They were like this for about one day at least.
Pretty soon we had four chrysalises in our cage. A day or two later, we had three more. So far, so good. We were so excited to be able to watch one become a chrysalis! I hastily grabbed my phone and got these not-the-greatest videos, but still, it’s pretty incredible.
(Something you should know about these videos: You might want to turn your volume down because my neighbor was cutting up a tree that fell during Irma with an electric saw, and it’s quite loud. Also, my son says the caterpillar is not shedding its skin. Actually, it is! It sheds all of it, and it will finally fall off in the second video.)
We also found a caterpillar hanging from one of the pots with the milkweed growing in it, and it made its chrysalis there. We were so happy to know where one of our “free” caterpillars went to. We looked around our yard for more chrysalises, but we couldn’t find any more at this point.
After about nine days, we began to notice that the chrysalises were turning a black color. This is actually because the chrysalis is transparent, and we could now see the monarch butterfly’s wings inside this beautiful pupa.
Exactly ten days after pupating, the first butterflies emerged from their chrysalis. I can’t tell you how excited we were.
We ran over to check the chrysalis on our pot. It had emerged too! It stayed there for about an hour, opening and closing its wings slightly, letting them dry. My boys were there when it finally flew away.
To our delight, we found three other butterflies emerging from their chrysalis in the yard! It’s easier to find the butterfly than the tiny, green chrysalis, but finding one butterfly led us to finding another chrysalis, which was nearby.
We stayed by this one all morning, and we were able to watch it emerge. It’s not the best video, but here you go:
Throughout the day, four of the seven butterflies in our cage emerged, and we let them go as soon as they seemed strong enough to fly.
The next morning, the last three butterflies emerged, so we said good-bye to them too.
Now all the butterflies are hopefully on their way to Mexico where they will spend the winter. If you’ve never heard about the Monarch migration, or how they congregate together in one place in Mexico, you should read about it.
I don’t think we’ll ever forget this experience, and it’s times like these that I’m especially glad we’re homeschooling. Most kids don’t get to stop what they’re doing and spend a whole weekday morning watching butterflies emerge from their chrysalises. But what better education is there than having an intimate experience with nature?
The boys are hoping we’ll get to do this again, and I’m hoping it doesn’t happen until we have plenty of milkweed. But our little milkweed plants are recovering and growing faster this time, so I’m hopeful. 🙂
What exciting experiences are you having this autumn?
My yard doesn’t look like the garden of my dreams, but I have fun trying. We don’t have the time or resources to create a beautiful outdoor space, but most of our yard is wooded and shady, so it’s pretty without trying. But it’s hard to grow new things in. Take a look at this….>
This is what our soil looks like! Hard, packed clay. Yeah. Not that clay doesn’t have any benefits, but the plants I want to grow need something else. And do you know how much it costs to buy good dirt and lots of fertilizer? Or create raised beds? Whoa. But like I said, I have fun trying.
I have embraced pots. I find it much easier to grow things in pots because the little soil we do buy doesn’t get washed away so quickly, and I can also put them in the sunniest place we have — our driveway. This year, I even managed to grow a sunflower. Just one. Though it was tall, it wasn’t big. I was thrilled. And you can see my son’s carnivorous plants are still going strong after all these years.
I do have a small garden area that’s fenced in, but it looks pitiful, so I didn’t take any photos of it. You can kind of see it in this photo behind the no-longer blooming hibiscus. (I think there is something pretty about flowers at each stage of their life.)
I’m attempting to keep a small area in there reserved for herbs. I have rosemary, thyme, parsley, basil, and this year I tried adding dill, which I started in a pot, of course. It’s a biennial, but I hope it will self seed and grow back year after year.
Every year I plant a couple of tomato plants, but this year they didn’t do well. This is unusual. I also planted cucumber, and we got a few of those. My eight-year-old also planted pinto beans just for fun. He used the bean seeds that we harvested last year, which his older brother planted. We don’t get enough to make it worth cooking them, so I think we’ll just replant them every year and see if we can slowly get a bigger harvest. This year we planted them along the fence, and they loved that because it was sunny and gave the vines something to cling to.
It’s also worth noting that we have a pretty cool lemon tree. Believe it or not, a few years ago my eldest son wanted to try planting seeds from a lemon that we bought at the grocery store. This was when he was still obsessed with planting every seed he came across. We planted a few of the lemons seeds, and they sprouted! One of them grew strong and sturdy, so I kept it. It took a very long time for it to grow into something, but look at it now! ….>
We have to keep it in a pot because it would not survive the winters here. I have to pull it into the garage when we get frost. (I really appreciate my husband for helping with this effort.) I also have to trim it a lot. It wants to get big! I’m not sure how long we’ll be able to keep it happy, but we’ll keep trying. It hasn’t given us a lemon yet, but we’re hoping one day it will!
Did you know that lemon trees have spiky needles on them?! We have to be very careful with it!
My main goal this year was to propagate and grow more flowers, and I was super pleased that I managed to grow these for the first time (one I already told you about.):
The coneflower and sunflower seeds came from my in-laws garden, and in the photo above, I think this flower came from some seeds I took from a plant at my friend’s house. It’s some kind of hibiscus.
I was also happy that this red hibiscus came back. I don’t remember what kind of hibiscus it is. I bought it at the botanical garden a year or two ago.
There were other flowers in my yard that didn’t come back, or either they had a weaker showing. Sigh. It’s so hard to keep everything going, but as the boys get older and more independent, I think I’ll have more time to devote to my gardening efforts.
We had a great showing of butterflies this year. They loved the purple coneflower, and everyday I could see two or more butterflies on it!
Snakes are also welcome additions to our garden!
Last but not least, this was the year I attempted to grow milkweed. My plan was to grow a good amount of milkweed, and then we’d order monarch larvae and raise monarchs just like we did with Painted Ladies.
First, I was disappointed that after planting 150 seeds, I got less than 10 plants, but it’s a start!
You can imagine my surprise when I found baby monarch caterpillars on them!
And they grew!
And grew!
And grew!
And it became pretty clear that we probably wouldn’t have enough milkweed for them. Plus, we had Tropical Storm Irma swing through here. But I’ll tell you what we did in future post that’s all about the caterpillars and butterflies.
As you can probably tell, I’m happy with my gardening efforts this year. Any effort to garden is good for children too. The boys don’t want to help me quite as much as they used to, but they’re still interested in the plants, will help with the planting, and the eight-year-old likes to water. My eleven-year-old is pretty good about taking care of his carnivorous plants too. (At least when I remind him.) I never make gardening a requirement for them because I want them to have fond memories of our garden. Hopefully they’ll have gardens of their own someday.
Did your gardening efforts pay off this year?
{Raising Painted Lady Butterflies} {Butterfly Life Cycle}
Note: This column was published in the Barrow Journal on June 26, 2013.
If you read my column regularly, you may recall that we raised Painted Lady butterflies this spring. We ordered the larvae from an online company and watched them grow, pupate and emerge into adult butterflies. Then we got the crazy idea to keep the butterflies, watch them mate, lay eggs, and raise a second generation.
I had visions of my house being invaded by tiny caterpillars, but I persevered thinking that at any time, I could throw the whole thing outside. I thought we’d just try it and see what happens.
We kept our first generation in our butterfly habitat, a roomy mesh cage about the size of an aquarium. Four out of six larvae made it to maturity, and when we observed them mating, we figured out only one of them was a female. She may have been overworked, but she was determined to carry on life, and she laid dozens of eggs on a small hollyhock plant that I had dug up and potted from my yard so that I could put it down into the cage.
Butterflies don’t live very long after they mate, so when we released our first generation, I’m not sure how much time they had left. For one, it was real quick – before it reached the tree in our front yard a bird came out of nowhere and snatched it up. My husband and I weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry. We were all sad, but fortunately, my six-year-old “little biologist” understands how nature works. My three-year-old didn’t seem to notice.
There are a few plants that Painted Lady butterflies will feed on, including hollyhock, and by sheer luck I had some growing in my yard because I had received the seeds for a present. The female butterfly will only lay her eggs on these plants so that once the larvae hatch, they can start eating right away.
The eggs are smaller than the point of a pin, and they’re a beautiful aqua blue with vertical lines that look like the longitude lines on a globe. We looked at them twice under a microscope. I had read that you can see the tiny caterpillars inside them, but we never observed that.
The eggs were tiny and scattered over the leaves of the hollyhock, so I’m not sure how many there were. I decided to put the plant on our front porch to avoid an “invasion,” but I left it in the mesh cage to protect it from predators. After about a week and a half, we found the tiniest caterpillars you can imagine wiggling on the plant leaves. They were less than a millimeter in length.
At this point, we clipped the leaves with the caterpillars and put them into a big mason jar. We covered it with a coffee filter and secured it with a rubber band. Punching holes into the filter is not necessary because the caterpillars don’t need a lot of air – the filter lets in enough. We added a fresh leaf from our hollyhock plants every other day.
Then we watched them grow and grow and grow. And eat and eat and eat. And poop and poop and poop. This is the life of a caterpillar. After six days, they were the size of our first generation when we received them in the mail. They moved so fast that I never bothered to get an accurate count, but I know we had at least 24 of them.
When they got a little bigger, we let some of them go in our garden, and I wished them well. I feared we wouldn’t have enough hollyhock to continue feeding all of them.
We kept 16 and divided them into four big mason jars to give them extra space. Of those, only ten of them survived to the pupa stage. All of them emerged or “eclosed” into adult butterflies, but, sadly, one of them was not fully formed.
The most troubling part of the whole process, however, was discovering that one of the butterflies went missing from our cage. Did they push open the cover? Did our cat get it? Did the three-year-old open the cage when we weren’t looking? Was I going to find a dead butterfly while vacuuming under the sofa? I was baffled.
It was even more troubling the next day when two more went missing, so we immediately took them outside to release them, only two days after they eclosed and while we were still waiting on two more to emerge. Luckily the case of the missing butterflies was solved when I lifted the paper towel from the bottom of the cage – three of them had crawled into the folds of the towel, and luckily they were healthy and strong and flew away as soon as I released them.
After that, it wasn’t long before the last healthy butterfly was born, and we discovered that last one was not healthy enough to fly away. We released the healthy one, and the other rests in peace.
Raising the butterflies from eggs to adult and witnessing the entire life cycle was a wonderful experience for my whole family. It showed us how fragile and beautiful life is, and while trying to help the butterfly with miniature wings, I thought of a line in my favorite poem by Mary Oliver. “Life is infinitely inventive,” she writes.
We hope some of them survive and are creating a third generation right here in Barrow County.
***
I hope you enjoy the following gallery of the butterfly life cycle! Click on an image to enlarge. To view a slideshow of the cycle of our first generation of butterflies, click here: Raising Butterflies
Last year I wrote a comprehensive post on how I have been doing kindergarten math. I teach my six-year-old math in a variety of ways, but our main resource is Life of Fred. At that time, we had finished the first book in the Life of Fred series (Apples), but when I started the second book (Butterflies), I realized it was too hard for the then five-year-old.
Pros
First, in case you’re unfamiliar with Life of Fred, it’s a comprehensive math curriculum for K-12, but you can buy the books separately, which is nice. It’s written like a story with a character named Fred who is a five-year-old math professor at Kittens University. If that sounds silly, you’re right. The story is light and fun, and it’s full of math. Each chapter ends with a few math problems for your child to solve. I like that it’s comprehensive, but it’s not overwhelming or a lot of busy work. We can finish a chapter and do the problems in about 30 minutes. My son loves the story too. For a child who seems to learn well through story, it’s really great.
{You can learn more about Life of Fred and download sample chapters here: When Do I Start Life of Fred Math.}
In September when we started our new homeschool routine, I started Butterflies with him. I was happy to find that my instincts had been right – last year it was too hard for him, but now it seemed just right. I am also more relaxed and using it as a guide for me.
I don’t worry if he doesn’t get something. I just tell him the answer and think of other ways to show him. As long as he’s not showing frustration or disinterest, I feel the best way is to go over the material many times in an easy-going manner.
Some of the math did not come easy to my son, so I tried to find other ways to teach him. For example, counting by twos and fives is a big part of Butterflies.
At first, I was at a loss as to how to teach my son how to count by twos and fives. I had gone over it several times. I used YouTube videos. I used charts. I took him outside and drew numbers with chalk, and then we did “skip counting” in a literal way! I wondered if he just wasn’t ready or if there was another approach I needed to take? As I said before, since my son did not balk at the lessons, I decided that just taking it easy and going over it again and again would be my approach.
Then one day he just got it! I have no idea what did it ~ Maybe it was that episode, LeapFrog Numberland, on Netflix? Maybe it was Life of Fred. Maybe it was all my attempts….in reality it was probably all of it together. Perhaps my son paid more attention to that song in LeapFrog Numberland because of all my attempts to teach him. Who knows? I didn’t really care. I was just elated he got it!
Now that we’re on the last chapter of Life of Fred: Butterflies, I’m happy to realize that it fit nicely into this Fall season too. (As I mentioned before, I alternate short reading and math lessons Monday-Thursday. I do one chapter at a time of Life of Fred.) I’m planning to order the next book and start it in January.
Cons
However, I want to mention some of the frustrations I’ve had too, and I still haven’t made up my mind as to whether Life of Fred will be our only math curriculum.
In Life of Fred: Apples, the author focuses on teaching all the possible equations that add up to the sum of 7. In Butterflies, he concentrates on adding to the sum of 9. While doing Apples with my son, he started to realize that the answer to the equations was “7.” He didn’t memorize that 5 + 2 = 7. In Butterflies, the answers to the equations in the book is either “9” or “7.” While this is good because my son can’t take for granted what the answer is, I can tell he’s not memorizing the equations. He usually has to count on his fingers.
And this brings me to my question of whether it’s important for him to memorize those equations? I wrote here that I wouldn’t mind if he counted on his fingers, and I still don’t mind. I’m glad he can figure out the answer for himself. But it also makes me wonder what else I need to do, or does it matter at this point?
I spoke to a friend of mine who is a retired Kindergarten teacher, and she told me that they never pressed the kids to memorize anything. Having fun and getting the answer is more important. This is how I feel, but you know, I always have those moments of second guessing.
I also have mixed emotions that parts of Life of Fred is hard. That is, the author will bring in non-math information or a higher level math. On one hand, I think it’s great. It’s teaching my son a variety of things, and there’s nothing wrong with introducing him to harder stuff, especially when I don’t worry about whether he really gets it. But there are times when I feel it’s going over his head and he’s not getting anything out of it. I worry he might become disinterested in the story.
This is mostly balanced by the fact that my son says he likes Life of Fred. The other day he said, “The only way I should learn math is with Life of Fred.”
So maybe none of that is a con. It’s more of an observation and consideration for the future. For now, we’re going to stick with Life of Fred, and I’ll supplement it with some other fun activities, math story books, videos and educational apps….like I’ve always done.
Some extra math resources
As I mentioned above, Life of Fred: Butterflies spends a lot of time on teaching counting by 2s, 5s, and also telling time. Here’s a few YouTube videos that I’ve used to help my son grasp these concepts. I especially like the video on telling time.
What are your recommendations for teaching math to youngsters?
Mama of Letters 