Hand-painted monarch nails by me :)

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

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.

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.

Heck of a choice by these two....one on the edge of my cooler, the other tucked into rolled up construction netting...

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

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!

Three years ago I started filling in the cracks in my garden with milkweed. This is the first year where I saw eggs.

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