The Monarch Butterfly

By Margaret Knights Hultsch

A beautiful butterfly sitting right on your hand and eating from a spoon! Wouldn’t that be fun? And it can happen to you this summer. Butterflies can be captured on the wing to enjoy this experience, but a more fascinating way is to raise them yourself from caterpillar eggs.

One of the most beautiful and interesting butterflies to raise is the monarch, the large orange and black butterfly that is seen throughout the United States and in southern Canada.

To find monarch eggs, look for seedling milkweed plants from six to eighteen inches high in fields, along roadsides, or in vacant city lots, because these are the only plants on which monarchs will lay their eggs. When you see a monarch dipping from leaf to leaf, it is probably a female laying her waxlike eggs, usually one on each leaf. Carefully turn the leaves over to expose their undersides and you will see the pin-size pale green eggs attached. Gather a few of these leaves and place them loosely in a large jar. Cover the jar with nylon netting or a stocking held in place with a rubber band and set it in a shady spot. The eggs will hatch in three to five days into tiny larvae or caterpillars.

If the jar is large enough, you can keep a couple of the larvae in it. Transfer the remainder to other large jars, boxes, or goldfish bowls. Don’t pick the larvae up with your fingers or you might injure the tiny creatures. Instead, let them crawl onto the tip of a watercolor brush and transfer them on its bristles.

Then comes your work. You must feed the larvae, and they have voracious appetites and are very picky about their food. They will eat only milkweed leaves. These must be kept fresh and changed daily. It helps if you form the leaves into little bunches and wrap the stems in wet cotton. You can keep a supply of fresh leaves in readiness in a plastic bag in the refrigerator.

Each day when you give the larvae fresh leaves, remove the old wilted leaves. Again, do not pick up these tiny caterpillars; transfer them on the old leaf on which they happen to be sitting. They will soon crawl onto a fresh leaf when you put them back in the jars. At the same time, clean the jars of excrement. Caterpillars must have clean homes.

Keep your jars in a shady spot, not on a sunny window ledge. If the climate where you live is very dry, it may help to drape a damp cloth over the tops of the jars. The caterpillars need a moist atmosphere in order to thrive.

Your caterpillars will eat, and periodically (four or five times) they will split their skins as they grow too large for them and emerge in fresh skins. After about a week and a half of gorging on milkweed leaves, the caterpillars will be two inches long and about 2,700 times as large as when they hatched from their eggs two weeks before. Their bodies are now banded in white, black, and yellow.

You may find caterpillars at this stage of development on milkweed leaves in the wilds and raise them from this point if you prefer. Look for them in the evening on the undersides of leaves where it is shady.

Soon your caterpillars will stop eating and begin to restlessly roam their jars. They are looking for a place to form their chrysalides, the next stage in their development toward becoming butterflies.

You can help provide a suitable place for this change by bracing a stick inside the jar. Soon each caterpillar will fasten itself by its tail end to a suitable spot, twist violently for several hours, and then dangle there, head down, in the form of a J for about a day. Now be watchful, and you may see an astonishing thing take place. The skin will suddenly split and peel back, revealing an object that is not a caterpillar at all. It is a compact little case about an inch long of a beautiful jade green color flecked with metallic gold. It looks much like a woman’s beautiful earring as it hangs there. This is the butterfly chrysalis, named after the Greek word for gold.

The chrysalis will gradually darken as it hangs downward and in a few days you will see that it has become transparent. Inside you can see black and orange markings! Another marvelous change is about to take place.

Keep watching and, after about twelve days, the chrysalis will begin to crack and split open, and out will struggle a butterfly with limp, crumpled wings. The new butterfly clings to the chrysalis, and slowly its wings unfold and stiffen until a showy orange and black adult monarch sits fanning its wings. A little more than a month has passed since the monarch began its life as an egg on a milkweed leaf.

Your monarch may be very tame now and crawl onto your finger or up your shirt. It may even eat from a spoon or the palm of your hand. Make a mixture of one teaspoon honey and one cup of water, and put a little in your palm or soak some up in a rag. Then set the butterfly on it. Butterflies “smell” with organs called tarsi in their feet and on their antennae, so allow their feet to touch the honey solution in order to encourage them to eat. Then they will uncoil a long proboscis and suck up the fluid as though through a drinking straw.

Let your monarch loose in a room, screened porch, or large screened cage. If you keep it in a jar, it may beat its wings to shreds trying to escape.

You should release your monarch after a day or two so it can carry out its life cycle properly. If you have nectar-producing flowers such as goldenrod, asters, or red clover, it will linger about your area for three or four days. Then another strange thing will happen. It will leave the area and slowly and instinctively wing its way northward.

Monarchs drift on the air currents at a speed of about ten miles an hour. Females lay eggs along the way.

Reaching the Hudson Bay region of Canada just as cold weather arrives, monarchs turn and travel south again on their famed migration.

Going southward, they travel in huge flocks with thousands of other monarchs. In no other form of life do so many individuals participate in such a mass migration. The flock may fly through cities or over bodies of water. Sometimes it is so thick that it will stop traffic on a highway over which it flies. At night the monarchs roost together in a tree, absolutely covering it. In Pacific Grove, California, a sanctuary called “Butterfly Park” has been established for the resting butterflies. And a remarkable thing about this migration is that, as far as anyone knows, no monarch makes the same trip twice. There is no leader who knows the way.

In about three weeks the flock reaches Florida. Some spend the winter there. Other flocks go to Texas, California, and even to Mexico and Central America. In the spring the butterflies start northward again, this time traveling singly. In their round trip they may cover 2,000 miles or more!

Scientists are interested in studying the migratory habits of monarchs and other butterflies. Dr. Fred A. Urquhart is one in particular who is interested in tagging these insects so that their migratory pattern might be followed. Many boys and girls in the United States and Canada help him each year with his work. They apply paper tags to the wings of monarchs they have raised themselves, or they capture adults with butterfly nets and tag these.

If you think you would like to engage in this scientific work of tagging butterflies and sending in reports on your activities, you may write to Professor Frederick A. Urquhart, Scarborough Campus, University of Toronto, Canada, MIC 1A7, for tags and directions.

Butterfly rearing can become more fascinating the more deeply you engage in it. One girl in Missouri who raised five monarchs from caterpillars last summer has become more ambitious this year. Her porch is covered with screened cages. Her goal—to raise one hundred monarchs from eggs and tag them for science.

Photographs courtesy Layne Esscey and Margaret Hultsch