Monarch Monday

Two of the 11 eggs I spotted on Saturday on some young Common Milkweed plants. In the photo below, you can see one of the eggs on the leaf around 11:00. Eggs are typically deposited on the underside of the leaves, as above, but occasionally you’ll spot one on the top side:

Monarch butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on newer milkweed plants. There’s less toxic latex in the young plants. The plants here were are all under a foot tall, some less than 6″. They are adjacent to a dedicated milkweed island, where the plants are all quite mature with seed pods now. (Common Milkweed is definitely a spreader, moving beyond the places people plant them.) Unfortunately, the egg-spotted young plants are in the mower zone, outside the protected patch. I’m tying to get this extra area staked off for the dozen potential Mexico-bound creatures.

An even dozen: there was also a 5-mm caterpillar on these little plants.