Monarch caterpillars are growing.

We were gone for the weekend…I had the Butterfly House all set up with 5 potted plants for the little guys…

My first look at them on Sunday afternoon was a bit of a shock…I thought the plants were withering up and dying…

Then I looked closer….almost all of the top leaves have been eaten.  In this photo you can see several large ones. I would expect them to pupate in the next day or two….

I now have 3 chrysalis in the top. One pupated while we were gone and this one early this morning. Here it has just rid itself of it’s skin.

You can see the difference between them. The one on the R is only minutes old…within an hour it looked just like the one on the L. Until that time, I would see movement every few minutes.

Here is a picture with at least 13 of the 27 that I now have.

I removed 2 of the stripped plants( you can see one on the L (above) that is just stalks) and this is 2 others.

I waited until all the caterpillars moved from the plant on the R to the one on the L , (all the big leaves are there) and then replaced it with a new plant. It wasn’t long before several of them had moved to the new plant.

The 2 plants were planted in the backyard where I am trying to establish a big patch of milkweed for the butterflies.

I had another bonus…can you see anything different in the photo below?

Look closely at the one on the R near the top…..That is a Queen Butterfly caterpillar…notice the extra feelers on its back?…and it has yellow dots instead of yellow stripes….it was on one of the plants I bought today…It just keeps getting better and better.