Tag: Eggs

When I bring in an egg, I immediately trim down the milkweed leaf on which I found it. The egg probably won’t hatch any time soon and in the meantime the leaf will dry and curl. If there is too much dry, curled up leaf it can be hard to spot the egg to see if it has hatched.

I then put each egg into its own container. I use “bug jars” I buy in bulk from Oriental Trading or Amazon, and tuck a piece of cut up pantyhose (rummage sales are a great place to get piles of pantyhose for pennies) between the lid and the jar.

      

Any jar will work if you put a piece of nylon over the top and rubber band it down. I don’t recommend mesh unless it is VERY fine. Newborn caterpillars are incredibly tiny Houdinis.

See the tiny air holes on the lid of the jar above? You’d think there were caterpillar exit signs posted on those things given how quickly the newborns will run right off the lovely piece of nice fresh milkweed I’ve just given them and make good their escape to explore my living room!

Hotel Daisy is now full up for eggs today:

It’s always hard to leave the rest of the eggs outside knowing so few will survive. Only one in every 200 Monarch eggs becomes a butterfly, or so I’ve read. My BBF (Best Butterfly Friend) S rushed to my rescue and took an additional 13 eggs, so between the two of us we guaranteed the survival of nearly 50 Monarchs today!

Grow Monarchs Grow!

Holy Crow, EGGS!!! So Many Eggs!!!

Today I brought in… wait for it… THIRTY-FIVE eggs! I am so excited I have been doing little whirling dances around the yard.

This is what a Monarch Egg looks like, right after a female butterfly lays it on a Milkweed plant:

See the little white dot? That’s an egg.

       Here’s another:         

Of course, they’re not always so easy to spot. 

See this one?    

No? Let me help:

Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between an egg and a bit of white Milkweed sap that has oozed out where a Milkweed Bug (more on them later) may have bitten the plant. Below, the white spot just to the left of the stem is Milkweed sap, and the white spot a bit out to the right of the stem is a Monarch egg:

The key is to check the shape. Milkweed sap will be flat, but Monarch eggs are egg-shaped with a bit of a point on the top. Check out the egg shape here:

Pointy!

I don’t accidentally bring in bits of sap anymore, but I brought in plenty when I was first raising Monarchs. Very disappointing, that. It’s terribly difficult to get sap to hatch.