Monarch Farm

No, I am not talking about a pastoral compound where the children of royalty are raised far away from the stinking peasants, being groomed to take over the ceremonial duties of state with aplomb and inbreeding.

I'm talking butterflies!

A few days ago, I saw my first monarch of the season, a couple of days ago, I found some eggs, and this morning, a friend posted a picture of her wee caterpillars going to town on milkweed. In the comments, someone mentioned that she had brought in eggs just that morning, and a discussion followed that included parasitic wasps, exploding caterpillars, and joy-filled children handling sleepy, damp butterflies.

I poked around a (very) little bit on the oracle, and found a page that tells you how to raise these little guys and gals inside your house. This was appealing to me for a number of reasons. For one, my common milkweed comes up everywhere, including the driveway, and I try to get those out before the eggs show up. Bringing them inside meant that I could both remove the giant plant and save the eggs. Everybody wins! For two, in the past, I have grown very attached to what I come to consider My Caterpillars, and have experienced great sadness and rage when they are, say, attacked and devoured by vicious little evil red ants.

For three, in the past few years, I have noticed a great decline in all my usual butterflies, and I have not seen any caterpillars, so the idea that I could finally show the boy this whole process was perhaps the best part.

The blog I was reading suggests that you can put the leaf bearing the egg into a plastic container, but we chose to dig up a few whole plants, as we have a tall butterfly pavilion (which is not necessary, it was just laying around here at the house), and I wanted to remove the plants anyway. I will probably seek out other eggs and use the leaf-removal system from here on in.

Finn and I stepped out and examined many of the common milkweed plants that are poking their noses into undesirable garden spots and found three or four eggs. We dug up the plants and put them into used plastic containers and put the whole set-up into the butterfly pavilion. The whole operation took less than 15 minutes, and I was treated to an impromptu song from the boy about working together, doing things together, because we love each other. He also exclaimed "I love that we are doing this!"

Yeah. That pretty much melts my cold heart of stone.

So here I sit, at my kitchen table, a butterfly pavilion full of milkweed at my elbow. And I can already feel my maternal protectiveness setting in. I'll probably be checking these plants ten times a day and worrying about the eggs and subsequent caterpillars when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Afton State Park: Covered in BEES

Finn and I went over to Afton State Park, another metro-adjacent Minnesota gem. They were having bee activities, where you could learn all about bees and make a bee craft. Pipe cleaners and tissue paper to the rescue! As bees, and other pollinators, have been the talk of the environmental world lately due to their apparent decline and phenomena such as colony collapse, I thought this would be a good learning experience for both of us. We have many pollinators in our garden, including honey bees, but our butterfly population was almost nonexistent this summer.

As with much of the non-human natural world, it's easy to put our own cultural biases and observations on top of them, so it won't surprise you to know that I did some mumbling when she said that the Worker bees, who are all girls, do all the work, and can sting. Yeah, it's no wonder they sting, slaving away while the drones, well... The Queen lays all the eggs, and the Drones, who are male, are sex slaves. No stinger. Which is helpful in a sex slave. In the fall, Workers block the Drones from the hive, and they die. (Insert snarky comment here.)

It won't surprise anyone to know that if flowers don't have bees and other pollinators, they don't grow. Other pollinators are wasps, hornets, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Wasps differ from bees in that they don't have hairs, their wings are longer, and their bodies are longer. Also, honey bees can only sting once and then they die; wasps can sting many more times, as we learned to our misfortune one summer and fall when they were nesting under our siding and repeatedly getting into the house.

Currently, honey bees are under threat from colony collapse, mites, fungus, pesticides, and the vast swaths of agricultural monocultures like corn and soybeans that blanket miles and miles of the heartland of the United States.

This was set up at the upper picnic area, and you could come at any time during the designated time frame to learn and make your crafts. Near the parking lot and the picnic area is a nice meadow, and we walked through it looking for butterflies and other insects. We did see a few monarchs and numerous dragon flies. At the beach, we saw common blue butterflies, which over-populated my youth to the point that they became mundane, but now, I rarely see them, so this was a treat.


What you should know: There are pit toilets at the upper picnic area, where this event was staged. They are a few yards down the trail. In them, you can see numerous spider and spider-adjacent species.

There are trails and a beach, but the beach is quite a walk if you have a small child who will refuse to walk after a time. Make sure you have a printed map with you because the signs on the trails were rather confusing, and I wound up making a wrong turn that ended with me walking way too far, eventually in the glare of the hot sun, carrying almost forty pounds of whining child on my shoulders.