Helping give monarch butterflies a chance to migrate from Iowa to Mexico is one of the things that Linda Black has been doing in her retirement.
Since taking up the cause, Black has helped more than 1,000 monarch caterpillars go from hatching as an egg to a butterfly.
She presented how she has been able to do so at an adult speaker series talk at Lester Buresh Family Community Wellness series Thursday, March 21.
Black and her husband live on a farm near West Branch.
She decided she wanted to do something when she discovered how significant the population loss for monarch butterflies has been trending for several years.
Black has taken a habit of planting habitats specifically designed for monarch butterflies, which includes three varieties of milkweeds.
“One thing I learned very early on – you can’t have all your milkweed in one location,” Black said. “Doing so just gives the predators of monarch caterpillars and butterflies a hunting ground.”
You need to intersperse other perennials and a variety of flowers in the garden.
Monarchs only plant their eggs on the bottom of milkweed plants. Those eggs will hatch, and that caterpillar will begin feeding on milkweed leaves.
The lifecycle between the egg hatching and a monarch transforming into a butterfly takes roughly 14 days to complete.
Black said once she locates the egg of a monarch on the bottom of a milkweed, she trims the egg off the leaf and packages it with a smaller milkweed leaf in a container that will house the unhatched caterpillar.
After a caterpillar hatches, she adds fresh leaves and cleans out the caterpillar byproducts twice every day (their waste and molted skin), and also adds fresh milkweed for them to feed on. As the caterpillars grow, she migrates them to larger enclosures, where they feed on larger and larger milkweed plants.
After roughly two weeks, she will transport them to a container where they will start the stage of growing a chrysalis where they will go from caterpillar to butterfly.
“The colors of that chrysalis will change from green to black to a clear color,” Black said “When they start on the clear color, that’s when you know the butterfly is ready to hatch.”
After the butterfly has hatched, it takes 10 minutes for their wings to dry out. Black said she leaves butterflies in that case for two hours before she takes them outdoors and finds a flower for them to land on and fully fry their wings out and prepare to fly off and continue their lifecycle.
“I normally try to avoid touching the caterpillars or butterflies at any point during this process,” Black said.
Some of the favorite flowers for butterflies to feed on are meadow blazing stars or Mexican sunflowers.
Black said she plants a lot more perennials than she does annual flowers.
If people are limited in the plants they can grow in their yard, she recommends planting them in pots instead.
August and September are definitely the busiest times of year for the last phase of caterpillars turning into monarchs before they make the migration down to Texas.
Every butterfly may lay 200 to 500 eggs but survival rate for eggs laid to actual growing of butterflies is between two to five percent.
Black noted it can be a time consuming hobby, depending on how many butterflies you’re trying to help at once.
Butterfly eggs start appearing in Iowa in May, roughly the same time the first monarchs are spotted here.
“By the time you’re seeing monarchs, is when you’ll see the first generation of eggs here,” Black said.
She recommends that if you have a milkweed plant and are trying to use it to feed monarchs, you should trim the top portion back in the middle of July to encourage it to grow more leaves and plants.
Monarch Fest is also celebrated at Indian Creek Nature Center July 13.
Because of the population drop-off that’s been seen in recent years, Black said there is talk of adding butterflies to the endangered creatures list.
Mayor Tom Wieseler spoke about sustainability measures being taken in Mount Vernon to add more habitat for pollinators and others.
How to help save monarchs
Nathan Countryman, Editor
March 28, 2024
Linda Black walks through the lifecycle of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly at the adult speaker series at he LBC Thursday, March 21.
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.