Caterpillar Daycare

The caterpillars are big enough that there is no concern about them eating each other.

Last night, the average length was 1cm. The white thing on the right is wet tissue used to keep the milkweed leaf fresh.


Today, I put all 5 of them in the same container with lots of fresh milkweed. The container is an old ice container from a previous fridge.

You can easily see all 5 of them. From here on in, I'll need to provide fresh milkweed daily and clean out their poop - which gets bigger and bigger as they get bigger and bigger.

When I was picking the milkweed this morning, I found another egg! There are 4 eggs as of today that will be hatching this week. The back 3 jars on the left don't appear to have eggs.

I would really love to be able to release a dozen adult monarchs this year. I will keep checking our monarch leaves for eggs.

All of this is taking place on the kitchen table.

Once the larvae get big enough to crawl off the leaves, I'll be putting them in a container that has a mesh lid where they will hang and form their chrysalises. That should be in a about a week to 10 days from now.