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.