Queen butterflies are not that common in our garden so imagine our delight when we found 6 caterpillars to save. Panic followed our delight as we thought about what we would feed them. In the end, milkweed and purple crown from the park solved our problem. We have very few Monarch caterpillars right now, I guess that opened up the space for the Queen.
Queens are from the Monarch family and to the untrained eye can look like just another Monarch. The caterpillars are very different, they have 3 sets of antennae and in addition to black and yellow they have some red too. The adults only have black veins on one side of their wings. Notice from the picture that the abdomen is the same color as the wings not black like the Monarch. We also discovered that their chrysalis often turns a light shade of pink after the first few days. Of the 6 we had only one chrysalis stayed green, but they all turned into beautiful butterflies. Below are some pic of the cats and a couple of the releases.
Our garden is truly a butterfly garden now and butterfly sightings always make us happy. You can see from the pics Isabel also enjoys them though she still shows no interest in writing the blog posts.
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