In spite of the cold weather this spring and the delay of flowers blooming, our milkweed has shot up in the last couple of weeks. I was out yesterday having a cursory look for monarch eggs and actually spotted a couple of them. One was right on top of a leaf. I decided this year, to take the top off the plant and keep it in water so the emerging larva would have fresh milkweed to eat for a few days after hatching.
I found two more eggs.
So I've put each stem in a water reservoir for flowers (
I buy them at Michaels) and the three of them are in a canning jar.
They'll be fine there until after the larvae hatch and they're crawling around relatively boisterously. Then they'll go into their individual containers until they're big enough (1cm or so) to go into the 'Caterpillar Castle'.
This is the earliest in June I've ever found eggs. I'm not sure how large a scale I want to operate this year. I raised 75 to adulthood in 2017 and scaled back to 25 last year, but we don't have any big summer trips planned so I'll just go with the flow.
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