Butterfly Farm

Welcome to our science experiment. Beware . . . you will learn more than you ever wanted to about Monarch caterpillars and butterflies. As I mentioned earlier, Jacob received a butterfly farm from his grandparents for his birthday. Since then we have been hunting for milkweed leaves daily, cleaning out very poopy jars, and watching this process! I have to say that as much fun as the kids had watching our caterpillars Brandon and I enjoyed it even more! You would have thought that they were our own newborn children with as many pictures as we took (but they kind of were since we nurtured them through their short childhood)! We ordered the caterpillars off of the internet, and due to shipping brutality (we think) we had about a 60% mortality rate with the caterpillars. It's a good think we ordered a lot! We ended up with 5 great chrysalises! Here are lots of pictures and even some cool videos we caught of the process!

Here is a tiny caterpillar on his 1st day in our home. (We didn't know when he hatched out of his egg, so we don't really know how old he is at this big.)

Here's a caterpillar just 1 week later at almost 2 inches long! They eat constantly, poop tons, and therefore grow very quickly!

After they get almost 2 inches long they spend about 1/2 a day crawling around on the lid of the jar spinning lots of silk so they can attach themselves to the lid. Then they hang in a "J" for another 1/2 a day.

Here's a video of the amazing process of turning into a chrysalis. They molt 1 last time. His skin splits open from the back of his head, his face literally peels right off and he's green underneath! This only takes about 5 minutes, so it's hard to catch! I waited an hour and a half to catch this pathetic video! Argh! (Sorry for the blurry video! Brandon gave me a lesson on focusing after this!)

A fully formed chrysalis!!!

After about 10 days the chrysalis turns clear but looks black. You can see the butterfly right inside. It's clear like this for about 8 hours or so.

After my focusing lesson I caught this video of a butterfly hatching from it's chrysalis!!!

A newborn butterfly with crinkly wings! They'll fill out as he flaps them.

Look at its tongue! It's the curly string coming out of its mouth! Cool!

This girl butterfly loved my nephew, Lincoln. She wouldn't fly away, but just crawled around on him for a good hour. He was very patient. You can tell she's a girl because of the 2 black dots in the center of her bottom wings.

A boy butterfly - see no dots! This truly was an amazing process and one we'll definitely do again! What a beautiful world we live in. Heavenly Father truly created some very beautiful creatures!