Three In One Morning... Our Best

Matthew perched and concentrating very hard as one by one the monarchs crawled up his arms and neck to take flight from his head.

With all of our butterfly hatching three emerging on the same morning was our best. We only had one cocoon that didn't survive to become a butterfly. All the others made it. I was surprised how many we actually saw metamorphose. It makes me feel a little more guilty smashing butterflies with my car now that I know the effort required to become one. It has been an amazing miracle for all of us to watch egg after egg hatch, grow, spin, sit, and emerge. I have a feeling we may have a few more rounds of this in the years to come.

"Mom, our caterpillars turned into raccoons!"

When Matthew's very first caterpillar made its cacoon he came running into our bedroom in the morning and yelled, "Mom, my caterpillar turned into a raccoon!" Dad's response was, "Wow, those are some caterpillars." For the life of me I cannot get him to call it a cocoon. It doesn't matter how hard I try, or how many spin their little magic. According to Matthew they are raccoons. The funny thing is Adam calls them the same thing half the time. Oh these sweet little boys.
The monarch cocoons become very translucent just before they are about to emerge. You can see the butterfly under the very thin outer shell. It is SO AMAZING TO WATCH THEM CHANGE!

The Last of the Swallowtails, the First on the Monarchs

The morning that we woke up to find our last black tiger swallowtail had emerged and said goodbye to it we also discovered the arrival of our first monarch. I love the monarch cocoons. They are so beautiful. I have never looked closely enough at them to see the small specks of gold that surround their cocoons until we started hatching them.

This is a picture of three of our critters at work. The first butterfly to emerge, one in its cocoon and the other as Jonathan says, "tying his back end to the lid."

Adam's Black Tiger Swallowtail Greeted Us At Breakfast

There is something about a beautiful butterfly sitting next to an empty cocoon that is very thought provoking over a bowl of cheerios in the morning. The power to change, the empty tomb, miracles, unfound potential... The Lord did a number with the metamorphosis of butterflies. Waiting for us at breakfast at last was Adam's butterfly.

It was interesting to me to watch the butterfly's wings dry as it slowly became more active. The other interesting thing is that they always climb upward towards the boy's heads. After we watched it for awhile and were confident its wings were dry, we took it out on the deck and let it fly.

The Beginnings of the Butterfly Project... Matthew's Emerges

I can't count the number of times as a child I caught a caterpillar, put it in a jar with a stick and hoped with all my little girl heart it would turn into a butterfly. All those years I failed to get one solitary butterfly to emerge. Needless to say I was a little skeptical when the boys wanted to try, but I was awestruck with the results. Adam and Matthew were helping me in the garden when they found several caterpillars munching on my dill. I told them to pull them and they informed me they were going to keep them. We put Matthew's caterpillar and Adam's caterpillar in a jar and decided to try our hands at cocooning. I was shocked when within a few days Matthew's had munched enough dill weed to form a crysalis. Adam's did likewise a few days later. We waited and waited and waited. Matthew's turned brown and I thought after being brown a good week it was a gonner. I was so surprised to find otherwise.

We had spent the entire evening outside as a family hauling mulch around our fruit trees. Jonathan had shredded several huge limbs that had broken in a wind storm and we were needing to get the mulch on. We worked like dogs. We were all tired, hungry and dirty and came in to find within our jar had emerged Matthew's first little miracle.

The success with the first two black tiger swallowtail caterpillars turning into cocoons spurned us on to try our hands at monarchs. This is the monarch set up on our countertop. We found several milk weeds with various sizes of caterpillars and eggs and tried our hand at hatching.