When going into the flight area this morning, I did not expect that I would see a female Monarch egg-bombing all of our milkweed, and taking in around 100 eggs! Some Caterpillars also hatched today!

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In the wild, monarchs usually lay 1-3 eggs/plant, and on the undersides of leaves, to make it harder for predators to find and eat the eggs. But in our flighthouses specially designed for breeding, monarchs lay dozens of eggs per leaf and hundreds on every plant!*

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Once the eggs hatch, we have loads of milkweed stems grown specifically for feeding the hundreds of caterpillars that will emerge from the eggs. It takes around 2 weeks for the caterpillars to change into chrysalides, so we always try to be on-top of milkweed amount for the caterpillars.

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After around 2-3 days of being in the chrysalis, we start shipping them out (so that they have hardened, and also won't emerge in transit, since it is so early on in the chrysalis cycle when shipping them). We also get a 2-3 week break from having to constantly feed hundreds of hungry little mouths, so that's fun! We stop sending out chrysalides around a week or a week and a half into the chrysalis stage (depending on the species), which is around the time that final development stages of the new butterfly are being completed inside of the chrysalis. We like to have that as our cutoff so we can make sure they won't emerge in transit.

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Once the butterfly emerges, the cycle continues after a week or so of flying around, and we are then gifted another batch of eggs.

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*NONE OF OUR BUTTERFLIES NOR PLANTS HAVE BEEN GENETICALLY MODIFIED IN ANY WAY TO SPED UP/INCREASE THE BREEDING PROCESS.