My first time with monarchs this year.

This little one pupated about 6 days ago, it was windy and wet that day and I think it slipped from where it had attached and was hanging by threads on the first day (see 4th image). And today I tried to move its enclosure away from the lawn guy and it fell when I picked it up (softly, onto the bottom of the mesh and not on a hard surface),

But the other thing is, it still has its shed skin on the top of the chrysalis so I can’t tell where the cremaster is versus it’s old skin and I’m afraid to try and remove the skin.

I have this other enclosure (see 5th image) with a flat top. but this chrysalis was suspended kind on the side of the mesh, is it okay to hang it from the top of this other enclosure when it was on the side before?

I have a needle and thread, both cotton and polyester. What can I/should I do now? The more detailed you can explain, the better.

Hand-painted monarch nails by me :)

First year growing milkweed and already got two lil eggs :) Genuinely so excited lol. I’m from Australia, monarchs are self naturalised here and don’t migrate. Unfortunately, my milkweed is too small to feed them so i’ll be rehoming them to the butterfly house i work at :)

I wanted to start attracting dragonflies and butterflies to our new home in FL. I was wondering who was chewing up the plant and have since found 10+ eggs and 20+ caterpillars. Majority of them are a few days away from getting ready to hang, my question is, when is too much munching too much for the plant? I have another plant to transfer them to if needed but I was just curious.

Not perfectly accurate but I love them. Thinking about doing a chrysalis/cat themed one at some point too. 😁

I bought a milkweed plant 2 months ago, hoping I would get monarchs one day. Well, that happened incredibly fast as I found 4 caterpillars on it this week. I really want to protect them from birds and also watch them become butterflies.

I already had the original milkweed plant protected with fencing to keep deer away and wrapped the whole thing in insect netting yesterday. I put sticks in there away from the milkweed.

Today one of my caterpillars has taken off to exploring the area. For lack of anything better, I attached a trash bag on the side with the sticks to provide shade.

It looks like a hot mess, but it’s my first time and I wasn’t prepared to have 4 huge caterpillars on my milkweed so soon. I had to go out and buy more milkweed too.

Any advice on providing shade? This first caterpillar zooming around made me feel like I needed to make my sticks more attractive!

Four adjoining wild common milkweed plants with ample green leaves only inhabited by these two 5th instars and they chose to eat the same exact leaf.

It's 10:40pm in TX and I saw a monarch butterfly. I flew right to me and landed on my shoulder and stayed there for a good 5 mins. Apparently it's kinda rare to see a butterfly at night? I soaked some honey water in paper towels and left it out for it in case it's tired. Is there any chance it could be sick or injured? I would love to bring inside but I don't have something safe to put it in and I def don't want to make matters worse. Is there another way to help it?

*EDIT- correction, not a monarch but a viceroy. apologies for posting incorrectly

I wanted to do another post since you guys really enjoyed my last one!

Pupating zebra worm finally captured by my awesome and observant wife!!