We found a caterpillar in my herb bed a couple of weeks ago.
I brought the dill plant, that the caterpillar was on, inside. I put the dill sprig into a quart jar.
It was sticking out of the jar, much like flowers in a vase would. I had a suspicion that this caterpillar was preparing to form it's chrysalis because of how slowly it was moving and how uninterested it was on eating.
Sure enough, with in a day it climbing off of the dill and found a place on my recipe box to form it's chrysalis.
After about two weeks the butterfly was ready to hatch. I noticed the chrysalis had turned a dark color yesterday morning. This made me think that I would be seeing a butterfly before the day was over.
We didn't catch the butterfly coming out of the chrysalis, but when we saw it it was still very floppy and wilted. It took several hours for it to pump it's wings full of fluid and let them dry out.
It was so fun to release the butterfly and watch it use it wings for the first time. It is amazing what a transformation takes place in just a couple of weeks inside a chrysalis!
Genesis 1:25 (KJV)
And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1 comment:
How neat! I would like to try finding a monarch butterfly caterpillar sometime, but we don't have a lot of milkweed plants around here. The boys recently found a cicada that hadn't molted from its shell yet, and we got to watch it transform into the adult cicada. It happened a lot faster than I expected, and was neat to watch!
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