Butterfly Palooza!!!

We have been watching Fritillaries and Longwings fly all over the garden for the past month, but could never find any in chrysalis.  I moved one of our plants just in case lizards were eating our cats and soon after that we noticed all of these ...  We have about six chrysalides on the plant and you can see in the pictures that one fritillary cat is in a J.  Click on the bottom picture to see all chrysalides, we marked them with a C.

Most of the chrysalides are longwings which is a change from last year when they were  mostly fritillary.  We can't wait to see the longwings emerge since we have never seen it.

In addition to these, we have a few chrysalides in our glass aquarium and one monarch that just hatched today. Check out our next post for some more cool info.

2014 Butterfly Season

It's Summer time and we are back in the garden!  We've added plants, moved plants and pulled weeds to get the butterfly garden ready.

The Fritillaries devoured our Passiflora plant last year so we had to give it to a friend so it could recover in her screened patio. So, too kick start the season I brought the plant back and added two more to our garden.  The plant immediately increased the numbers of both Fritillaries and Longwings.  It's so awesome to see the butterflies flying around the garden.  On most days we can see Monarchs, Fritillaries, and Longwings.  Queens are less common, but they do come to our garden.



Fritillaries appear to have SUPER senses; they find the plant as soon as I put it out and cover it with eggs.

This is a picture of one of the three monarch caterpillars we've raised this season.  Stay tuned for our next post when we share some new discoveries in our garden.