Our Monarch Hotel 6 :-) Tons of Cocoons!

We recently (appx. 5 weeks ago) moved into a home from a temporary apartment.  The home and yard both needed lots of TLC.  Since working outside in the yard is good therapy for me, I have spent many hours (and lots of money lol) trying to improve the yard while doing something I really love!

As you will see from some of the photos below, I have cleared out what was an over-grown area (so it is a little ugly for the moment).  The biggest plus in the cleared area was that there was a HUGE Lantana bush.  With the knowledge that butterflies love Lantana, I went to the garden center and bought 2 huge milkweed bushes.  From my last year working on flowers etc. and from the Monarach Watch program, I knew they (Monarch) would need milkweed to lay their eggs on.

Last week (4/19/09) as I was watering the bushes etc. I discovered there were tons (appx. 40) Monarch Larva all over the bushes. 

I took the first two photos on 4/22 and you can see the bushes are pretty well intact, but they have been munched on pretty well.  Two days later, both bushes had no leaves!  We ran down to a nursery close by, and all they had were 9" plants. The plants were healthy, and we bought 6.  We thought they would last until we could get to the larger nursery and buy a couple more large milkweeds. 

The next morning after placing the 6 smaller bushes in our "primitively made" hotel, all 6 were cleaned of leaves! I could tell by the appearance of the larva many of them were about to start their cocoon phase so we ran and bought 5 more smaller ones. Well they cleaned those as well! 

Thankfully, a majority of them are as of today 4/27 are cocoons!!  See the pics!  Plus we were kinda proud of our Monarch Hotel since we used things around the house to make it with and didn't have to spend more money, as we've spent a fortune on this little critters already!!