Tag: 🦋 Butterflies

I have been noticing tons of the common white butterflies around the past week or two. Today was the first time that I had my phone on me to grab a picture of them.

Today, I spotted the first monarch butterfly that I am one hundred percent positive that I saw.

Just for shits, I stuck some of the milkweed plants I started from seeds in pots that we had lying around the other year. They’ve come back up in those pots since. This spring they seem to be doing really well in the pots.

I haven’t seen many monarch butterflies around our house this year. Other years I saw them most of the day.

We spotted a monarch butterfly hanging out near our rose bush today.

I saw the first monarch butterfly of 2020, or at least the first one that I am positive that I saw. I thought I saw one out of the corner of my eyes before, but today I was certain.

I think I saw a monarch butterfly near our potted plants. I can’t be sure because it was out of the corner of my eye.

Our pink swamp milkweed that we finally picked up last summer seems to be coming up again. We thought the original white one we got was the pink one but it was apparently mislabeled. It sucked that it wasn’t the one we got but the butterflies loved in none the less. We weren’t sure it was even going to come back up considering we didn’t buy it and plant it until August and the monarchs found it immediately.

We spotted a freshly emerged monarch butterfly drying itself on our hibiscus today.

Two monarch butterflies nectoring on our new pink swamp milkweed flowers Our milkweed was eaten bare save a few new leaves the caterpillars hadn’t found yet. We happened to be at a hardware store picking up sand for our sandbag and saw there was still some stuff in the garden center so I suggested we go look for milkweed just in case they have any left. We walked right past it at first then I smelled the vanilla smell.

It was a decent day and we wanted some fresh air today so we opted to go out on the riverfront trail and grab a few caches. It was a pretty nice day though. Pretty much the whole time out there we kept seeing these butterflies flying all around. Butterfly on plant along the Northwest River Trail I haven’t been able to discover for sure what type of butterfly (or moth it is) but I am pretty sure it is a butterfly.

We have been wanting to plant milkweed for a couple of years now. We finally found some and planted it in our front yard. Last spring, we actually had monarch butterflies and caterpillars on it.

There’s been a monarch chrysalis hanging on my chair on the porch for a while. We’ve been keeping a close watch on it. Today it cleared up, and we actually got the opportunity to watch the butterfly drop out of it.

We spent the spring looking for butterfly weed last year. First we checked at Hostetters in Mount Joy but they didn’t have any yet. We found ourselves at Stauffers later for other plants and decided to check there. We found swamp milkweed instead so gave it a try. I grew well and did attract monarchs. It turned out to be white instead of the pink it was marked as but it was okay.

Last fall I gathered tons of milkweed sees from the pods as they dried out thinking it was worth a shot to try to propagate more plants from seeds because we had a few people ask us about where to get the flower that attracts the butterflies. I had no idea if the seeds were mature enough to harvest or anything like that but I got a baggy of seeds to try it out.

We went to a geo event at Blue Marsh today. It was actually pretty interesting getting some information of how search and rescue works and hearing about Middle Creek Search and Rescue. You have to really appreciate the work they do. It was really interesting seeing how the k9s do their work. Of course after the very interesting presentations we wandered off to find some geocaches. It was really a nice area to explore and we’ll absolutely have to return to Blue Marsh some day.