Raising Monarchs Part 3

By now you are well aware that we’ve raised a monarch butterfly from egg stage. However, if you are new to Toys In The Dryer, you can catch up with Part 1, the egg, and Part 2, the growing caterpillar, before you read this part 3, the chrysalis and release of our butterfly.

In a total of 32 days our monarch went from a newly laid egg to an adult butterfly!

It was fun and interesting to watch! Unfortunately, we missed the most awesome parts such as watching the caterpillar molt, seeing it go into chrysalis, and watching our butterfly emerge from chrysalis, but it was a learning experience none the less.

I ended Part 2 of this story on day 20, the day before our caterpillar went into it’s chrysalis. On day 21 we awoke to the “j”. I knew it wouldn’t be long before we had a chrysalis. In fact, if you look closely at the photo on the left above, you can start to see green coming through on the caterpillar. Unfortunately, hubby decided to take the boat out that day and he didn’t have the patience to wait for us to catch the chrysalis process on video. We came home later that day to it done. I and the girls were a bit bummed. I did, however, find an awesome video that showed how a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis. It’s a bit long but definitely worth the watch!

I had no clue that they squish themselves themselves up then molt into a chrysalis! Sure enough though, here’s our caterpillar’s skin…

After 8 days of nothing but a boring chrysalis, we had some definite color change on day 31. I knew it would be emerging soon but I thought we had a little more time. I went to a meeting in the morning. On the way home I got a frantic text from Nutty…

“Our Butterfly!”

In the morning she said the chrysalis was black. At around 1:00 pm she happened to walk by and see a newly emerged butterfly! Again, we were all disappointed that we missed it. Here’s another great video I found online though…

It took a few hours for it’s wings to dry so we carefully played with it for a bit.

Oh, and by the way, our monarch is a girl! Wanna know how to tell? If it was a boy it would have black spots where those arrows are in the photo below.

Last but not least, as promised, here is a video compilation of the daily photos we took…

I definitely know we’ll be doing this again next year!