Monarch Butterfly

Thanks, I am in a rural area, too, where the agriculture is quite mixed and a lot of waste areas exist so I doubt that farmers here use any very extreme amounts of herbicides. I have found a couple of wild butterfly weed plants on my land, but have never seen any larva on them. Next year, I think I will plant quite a few more. Perhaps they can provide a generational stepping stone for the northern moving population.

When I was young and lived up north, we had three milkweed plants in our yard that always had larva on them every summer. We would sometimes put one in a "butterfly cage" and feed it until it pupated. The chrysalis is beautiful and the exciting thing was that it turned the color of the butterfly a day or two before it hatched so we had a heads up about when the butterfly would be emerging.