Insects
Little Miracles in Arbor Lakes
Hanging from backyard plants and sometimes the house windowsills are small jade green sacs where Monarch butterfly caterpillars are transforming into adult butterflies. Each caterpillar’s stomach, intestines and other internal organs disintegrate into embryonic soup that will give rise to wings, legs, head, thorax and abdomen and new internal organs. This process uses so much […]
So You Think You Gained Weight!
The small milkweed jungle in our backyard is alive with Monarch caterpillars of all ages. Some caterpillars busily chew leaves and others crawl up or down milkweed stems to find fresh foliage to eat. One caterpillar is fully grown and sneaks away from the jungle to look for a quiet safe place to form its pupa. […]
Restless Caterpillars
Each morning Anne scours the milkweed plants for her monarch caterpillars. We know that some of them are large enough to go through the next stage of their life cycle when they transform from larvae to pupa to adult. Some caterpillars have gone astray and Anne enlists my services to help her find them. Knowing […]
Bite, Bite, Bite, Chew
So goes the monarch caterpillars on our backyard milkweed plants. The small bushes begin to look like Charlie Brown Christmas trees as the caterpillars crawl up and down the milkweeds devouring each and just about every leaf. It is smart that the monarchs only lay a single egg on a milkweed plant and not all the […]
We Have Poisonous Caterpillars!
It has been about a week since the monarch butterfly spent breakfast with me and deposited several eggs on milkweed plants in our backyard. Anne and I decide to search the plants to see if the eggs hatched and to find the caterpillars. It takes a few minutes, but we find a small caterpillar hanging […]
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