i have 2 monarch caterpillars on my scarlet milkweed. it seems late for them. but it is supposed to dip into the 40's for the next 2 nights. do i need to bring the monarchs inside?
monarch question re: tolerance for cold
I would bring them in, but I'm a softy.
We've got thirty plus up here in Jax. I'm assuming they'll go into diapause and emerge next spring? The females are still laying eggs up here.
Maggie
This message was edited Oct 22, 2006 7:14 AM
they made it through night one. there is an enclosed garden in dallas and i think i will call and see if they can take them. now i was told by someone else that monarchs don't do this diapause thing. also, that if i brought them in and they made it to butterflies that they would accept me as "MOM" and follow me around the house if i didn't cage them. but that they would only prob. live a month that way. said i could feed them fruit mush and gatorade thru a cotton ball. is this true?
Don't know about following you around- seems reasonable. You can feed them with the cottonball/gatorade/mush. One nice way to do it is to put some nectar mix in a dish with one of those knitted looking pot scrubbers. The b-fly can sit on the scrubber and put his proboscis through the netting.
Maggie
From enchantedlearning.com:
LIFE SPAN
It takes about a month for the adult to develop (from egg to pupa to adult).
The life span of the adult Monarch varies, depending on the season in which it emerged from the pupa and whether or not it belongs to a migratory group of Monarchs. Adults that emerged in early summer have the shortest life spans and live for about two to five weeks. Those that emerged in late summer survive over the winter months. The migratory Monarchs, which emerge from the pupa in late summer and then migrate south, live a much longer life, about 8-9 months.
mamajack - I have raised them in a cage and kept them through their short life span (4 weeks). Last winter, the weather here reached freezing and stayed cold for several weeks, so I did not want to release them to their death. They lived on Gatorade that was poured into a jar lid and I added a white unscented tissue to it to absorb the gatorade and for them to land on. I changed it out every feeding twice a day. They would swarm around my hand when I put the gatorade in the cage. They knew it was mealtime. Kind of neat actually. I also had brought in some of my potted milkweed and stuck one in the cage so they could also drink the nectar - as the flowers continued to bloom as long as the plants were in the sun during the day. (I brought them in at night to keep them from dying from the freezing temps.) I had 18 Monarchs that lived out their life that way. They even mated and laid eggs all over one of the Milkweed plants. But the offspring were not as healthy and died at various stages or were deformed. (Probably due to the gene pool since the parent butterflies were siblings.)
So it can be done, but it is a lot of work. Monarchs spend a lot of time resting in nature, so the need to fly is not as important for them as other varieties of butterflies. I don't think that you could do this with a Swallowtail or GF because they have a much greater need to fly more than rest.
thanks to everyone that helped me. it is sad to know that there little lives are so short. i know i must have found the mother dead in my garden a few weeks ago. and there are not 2 caterpillars but 3. my son found another one today.