University Place

Attracting and Raising Monarch Butterflies

[Carol Shirk, Dodge County Master Gardener Association]

Good evening and thank you for coming to the Dodge County Master Gardener Association monthly meeting. My name is Carol Shirk, but I would like to introduce Gae Bergmann to you. She is one of our own, and she is going to be speaking tonight on raising magnificent monarchs. She’s been a Dodge County master gardener for nine years. She’s raised monarchs nearly all that time, and she has raised and released 500 or more of them on her Fox Lake property. She has four varieties of milkweed on her property as well as a large number of flowers on her property as well. This has resulted in her property being declared a home – or being certified as a Monarch Way station.

Tonight, she’s going to share the reasons why it’s essential to begin raising these beautiful insects. She’s going to talk about the life stages of the monarchs. She’s going to talk about the procedures to follow for you to have success and why it’s important for each one of us to be involved with that. And also, why it’s necessary for you to plant milkweed in this process as well. So, without further ado, I would like to introduce Gae Bergmann.

[applause, whistling]

[Gae Bergmann, Master Gardener, Dodge County Master Gardener Association]

[laughing] Oh, goodness. Well, this is sort of a passion of mine that I don’t know how it came about particularly, except I had a daughter who said, “Hey, Mom, what do you think about these things in this little jar?” I said, “Okay, fine, I can try those.” And unbeknownst to me, there was some milkweed on our property. That began this long journey.

[slide titled – Why Monarchs Matter – featuring a photo of a monarch butterfly hanging out on a leaf and the following bulleted list – Intrinsic; Aesthetic; Educational]

Alright. Monarchs matter. Most butterflies, most insects actually matter, but some of them matter more than others. As far as I’m concerned, monarchs are the most important, of course. They have been around for more than 50 million years, which just boggles your mind. They’re part of our basic biodiversity in this land of ours.

They have been part of literature for – since the Bible was – was prepared. Bible, Shakespeare, modern day. It evokes –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– in – words like peace, beauty, freedom.

Educationally, they are kind of fun because when they get into the classroom and the kids start learning about monarch butterflies, they are enthralled.

Monarch butterflies are important pollinators.

[new slide again titled – Why Monarchs Matter – now featuring a photo of numerous monarch butterflies on a milkweed plant and the following bulleted list – Scientific; Ecosystem; Economic]

They are part of the health of our econ – our ecosystems. If we don’t have pollinators we are in deep trouble.

I’m going to go to economic first. One of the most important things about the economy of certain countries is the trips that people take to see the butterflies which are roost – roosting in the trees. And on –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– November 1, that is called The Day of the Dead in November. And this is the day that many Mexicans feel that the coming, returning butterflies, each one holds the soul of one of its dead people, one of its ancestors.

Ecolo – the ecology is one of the reasons, and has three major ones behind it, as to why the dearth of butterflies is occurring.

The first thing that happens that we can’t do anything about are the severe weather systems that pass through. This year in March, early March a horrendous storm went through the – over wintering sites in central Mexico – El Rosario was one, there are two others – which literally devastated those sites. The butterflies on the trees were killed as the trees went down. The butterflies on the ground were covered with snow and ice and died. The – the prob – one of the estimates says that from 3% to 50% of all the monarchs were killed. We won’t know until the end of the summer, but we hope it’s not that bad.

This is a picture of one of those sites –

[slide featuring a photo of downed trees and some tree stumps where trees had been removed after storms in Mexico]

– which shows how the logging has – this is – this is salvage logging, actually they’ve taken out some of the trees. But you can see in the background that those are the oyamel forest – oyamel fir trees, and they literally are up. This is a very dead piece of land right now.

At the same time there is an awful lot of –

[slide featuring a photo of a milkweed plant looks like it is dying]

[new slide with a bar graph titled – Total Area Occupied by Monarch Colonies At Overwintering Sites in Mexico 1994 – 2015 – on the x-axis are the years and on the y-axis is the total forest area occupied by monarch butterfly colonies in hectares. The graph shows a large decline in forest area for the butterflies starting in around 2000]

– illegal logging going on in the overwintering sites. For example, last year we had – Ooh, this is fun –

[laughter]

– 0.67 hectares of milk – of monarchs roosting in the overwintering sites. Two years ago. Last year, we were back to 1.3 hectares. A hectare is equal to about 2 1/2 acres. Look back to the – to the tall one -18 hectares way back in the 90s. So, you can see why we’re having a little problem trying to get them restored.

Another main problem, unfortunately –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– is in this country. We’ve lost 147 million acres of cropland and grassland in this country since – in 25 years. A lot of this is due to development, whether it’s commercial, residential, business. They’re just plain gone. They’re not there anymore. And I hate to throw stones, but there are some things called genetically modified organisms that have to do with farmers and their fields. Those things kill everything, including milkweed.

This is a picture of a –

[slide featuring a photo of a milkweed plant looks like it is dying]

– milkweed plant that’s been hit by some kind of chemicals, I have no idea what. But it doesn’t look too healthy.

[return to the slide showing the storm damage]

[return to the slide with the bar graph]

[return the Why Monarchs Matter slide]

[return to the slide showing the storm damage]

[return to the slide showing the dying milkweed]

[return to the slide showing the bar graph]

[new slide featuring a map of North America that shows the migration patterns of Monarch Butterflies – the North and West of the U.S. are colored yellow indicating the Summer range, the South and Southeastern U.S. are colored green indicating the Spring range, and there is a blue starred area indicating where the Monarchs overwinter in Mexico]

Now we’re starting our journey. Along about the middle of February and March, the monarchs begin to move from their overwintering sites down in central Mexico. They will get up as far as Texas, Colorado, the southernmost states that we have, and there they will [laughing] –

[new slide showing a close-up of a Monarch on a plant with part of its wing missing]

[new slide showing another Monarch on a cottony-like plant also with damaged wings]

[return to the first close-up shot of the Monarch on the plant with part of its wing missing]

– do funny things like this. You can see. [whispering, This is fun.] This wing is gone. This color is pretty much decimated.

[return to the close-up photo of the Monarch on the cottony-like plant with damaged wings]

This wing right here is completely gone. They can fly, this one isn’t too healthy either, but their main purpose in life right now is to mate, lay eggs, and die. The next generation –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– will do the same thing as it moves north. This will happen two or three more times until –

[return to the slide with the migration map]

– they get to Wisconsin and even up into Canada, which is a wonderful site.

Now –

[return to the first photo of the Monarch with part of its wing missing]

– on my journey –

[return to the second photo of Monarch with damaged wings]

– I kind of –

[new slide featuring a photo of Gae at home standing amongst her milkweed plants]

– have a lot of milkweed ready to go. I don’t see anything. My milkweed is healthy. Where the heck are the butterflies?

[audience member chuckles]

[new slide featuring a photo of bunches of umbels in an aluminum tray]

Unbeknownst to me, some female showed up one day, and I never saw her. She laid eggs on all the umbels that are in this container. They were on milkweed plants, and only 5 to –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– 10% of all the milkweeds – of – of – the eggs which are hatched actually survive. It’s a horrible, horrible number, whether it’s predators or whether – you name it – not many of them survive.
So, now I know there’s been one in my yard.

Now my milkweed is blooming.

[slide featuring a photo of the milkweed in Gaes garden in full bloom]

That doesn’t look too bad. And if you’ve ever been anywhere near a milkweed patch like this, the fragrance is fantastic. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful smell. It’s lovely.

[new slide featuring a photo of a young milkweed plant that is in Gaes front yard]

We also have a patch in our front yard. We also have a resident woodchuck.

[audience murmuring]

What he does is turn the st-stem over, chew off the leaves, and let it return to its upright position. So, we had to fence that in. We haven’t caught him yet; we’re working on it.

[laughter]

[new slide featuring a photo of a lone milkweed plant that has started growing between the sidewalk and the side of Gaes house]

Milkweed is a rhizome, so it grows underground. Over here is my –

[new slide featuring a close-up photo of a Monarch on one of the leaves of one of Gaes milkweed plants]

[new slide featuring a macro photo of a of Monarch egg on a milkweed plant]

[new slide featuring a photo of the backside of several milkweed leaves all with Monarch eggs on them along with a needle next to one of the eggs to show scale – they are very small]

Whoa!

[new slide featuring a photo of the back of a single milkweed leaf with a Monarch egg on it and having needle next to the egg to show scale]

Back up –

[return to the macro photo of the Monarch egg]

– over –

[return to the photo of the Monarch on Gaes milkweed leaf]

[return to the photo of the milkweed plant growing between the sidewalk and house]

– here is my milkweed patch. This is a cement sidewalk, that’s the side of our house.

[female audience member]

Geez!

[Gae Bergmann, off-camera]

It – the milkweed grew underneath the sidewalk and up there.

[laughter]

Isn’t that cool?

[return to the close-up photo of a Monarch on the leaf of one of Gaes milkweed plants]

Holy cow! June 3 last year, I saw my first monarch butterfly, so now I go out and I start chasing her around.

[return to the macro photo of the Monarch egg]

If you’re looking for a monarch egg, this is a very large picture of one. I tell people to look for small, pale, green, football-shaped eggs. They’re usually underneath the leaf, they’re not on top.

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

Sometimes they fool you. But this is a large one and this gives you the shape of it. This picture I – I took because –

[return to the photo of the backside of a single milkweed leaf with a Monarch egg and a needle on it]

– this is the size of an egg underneath a milkweed leaf.

[return to the slide with the backsides of multiple milkweed leaves with Monarch eggs on them and a needle for scale]

Each one of these has an egg on it. There’s one up here, there, there, here, and this one right here.

Let’s see if I can do this next.

[slide featuring a photo of a mesh iron table on a deck with several items on it – a glass of sangria, one plastic container that has milkweed leaves in them, another plastic container that has milkweed leaves in them that also have tinfoil on their tips, a scissors, a plate with two sponges on it, and a container with tinfoil in it]

I collect leaves from wherever I can get them. I put them in – I wash them off, put them on paper towels, put them in a plastic bag. They stay fresh that way for quite a long time and don’t need to be – you don’t have to constantly be going outside to pick up – pick more leaves.

When I get leaves with eggs –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– on them, I will take a piece of – a small piece of paper towel, wet, put it around the end of the leaf to keep it fresh, and then I’ll put a little piece of foil on the end. These in the – in the – middle container –

[return to the previous slide with all the items on the mesh iron table]

– have been treated. They are all eggs on that one. The far – the top one has not had their ends sealed. And because it’s such a stressful job, a little homemade sangria never hurt.

[laughter]

[new slide featuring a photo of Gaes kitchen counter that has a variety of plastic containers full of milkweed leaves on it]

This is half of what my kitchen counter usually looks like on my journey.

The containers that you put your milk – your monarch caterpillars in, and eggs don’t make any difference when they’re small. You do need to aerate –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– them, ventilate the containers. So, I poke a hole from the inside out because when they go up to the top, you don’t want them to impale their little selves on the cut plastic that’s on the bottom. You can put them in glass jars, you can put them in anything. I put them in any kind of plastic container that’s available.

The smaller they are, the smaller the container can be, so that’s no problem. The ones in the back are absolutely wonderful containers. They’re all these pretzel containers.

[return to the previous slide with the photo of all the containers on Gaes kitchen table]

And so, when the caterpillars get large enough that they’re going to go into chrysalis, I put them in there because when they – when they hatch from the chrysalis, they need to hang down and have their wings dry.

[new slide featuring a macro photo of a Monarch egg that is about to hatch]

This is what – look – this is a very big picture also – but this is what a monarch egg looks like when it’s about to hatch. From the time you see an egg, it may hatch in a half hour, it may hatch four days later. [Using mouse pointer to indicate the top of the egg] This is the head of the caterpillar. When he comes through this egg, he will turn around and eat the egg because it has a great deal of nutrition in it for him.

[new slide featuring a photo of the back of a milkweed leaf with a Monarch caterpillar on it and has a hole in the middle where the caterpillar has eaten the leaf]

These are pictures of the caterpillars which have hatched and done this.

[new slide featuring a photo of the backs of two milkweed plant leaves that have tinfoil on the ends and have Monarch caterpillars on them. Both caterpillars have also eaten a circular hole in the leaves]

This one has done the same thing.

[new slide featuring a close-up of Monarch caterpillars on the backs of two milkweed plants. They have also eaten circular holes in the leaves. The photo also features the end of a ballpoint pen in it for scale]

This one has done the same thing. What they do – which absolutely fascinates me –

[new slide featuring a photo of the back of three milkweed leaves that have Monarch caterpillars on them. The leaves all have circular holes in them]

– they eat a hole in the leaf, they eat a circle. This is called –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– trenching. And what that means is they cut this milkweed into a circle. They cut off the supply of latex that’s in the leaf because the latex is so sticky their little, tiny mandibles can become stuck together. And they can’t eat. So, they cut off the fluid – the fluid, eat what’s in the center, and then they have enough strength and size to be able to go to the edge of next leaf and start working on it.

When –

[slide featuring a photo of Gae holding up a holey leaf with two Monarch caterpillars on it with her left hand, in her right hand she holds some scissors. Additionally, there is a milkweed leaf sitting on the table beneath her hands that also has a Monarch caterpillar on it next to a portion of leaf that has been cut off from an older leaf]

– they get large enough – and there’s a bunch of eating on this leaf – they need new leaves. So, what I do is cut a small piece around each caterpillar, put it on this edge down here. And this guy I had on here took it probably from here, put him down here, and he was ready to go onto a new leaf anyway. He didn’t like it on that one because it was an old leaf, and it wasn’t that fresh anymore. He wanted the new one.

[new slide featuring a photo of four larger Monarch caterpillars on a short milkweed stalk that is on a paper towel. On the paper towel is also many, many small caterpillar feces]

This is not my cage. When caterpillars eat, they also poop. Poop is called frass, F-R-A-S-S. That’s frass. This is a cage that should have been cleaned out days ago. [chuckles] There are four caterpillars on here, each of whom has probably decimated that leaf stem as much as it possibly could. What I would do would be to pick up the stalk, put them on the counter – because they don’t go anywhere, they just crawl –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– very slowly – pick up this thing, put down a new paper towel, and clean the whole thing out. Maybe it needs to be washed. Cages should be kept dry, they should be kept clean, and they should be full of leaves for your caterpillars.

This is parenthetical. At the end of the summer –

[slide featuring a photo of three milkweed pods, one of which has a Monarch caterpillar on it]

– the – the burrs were beginning to go into pods, and I just happened to see this little guy out here. I thought, “Holy cow, that’s really cool” because I’m about done with this. But I looked, I brought in about 10 of these pods, put them in the house. They all had eggs on them, and they all hatched, which was kind of nice.

[new slide titled – Monarch caterpillars grow through five instars in about two weeks – and features a photo of five Monarch caterpillars each of varying sizes with each size caterpillar having a number next to it to indicate in which instar they are]

The caterpillars go through five instars. Each time it does, it goes to the top of the cage, attaches itself for a while, turns – loses its skin – because the skin is too small – eats the skin, and then proceeds to come back down. That’s called an instar. It does it five times. When the caterpillar is about 2 inches tall – this is about the time he goes into a big cage – he goes into one of these guys.

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

Because I want him to go up to the top, I want him to be safe up here.

This to me is a fascinating process.

[slide featuring a photo of the six stages a Monarch caterpillar goes through when they form a chrysalis]

When the caterpillar is about to go into chrysalis, he goes to the top of whatever cage it is and weaves a very sticky mat across the top. It’s fascinating in that there is this little white button that attaches up there. And he hangs up there in a “J”. And you know that the J is going to be the beginning of his going into chrysalis. This could last for about 24 hours. He could be two days hanging in the J. If you jiggle –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– the cage, he’ll go [makes a clucking sound] like this, and he curls up and then he curls back down again. When he’s about to go into chrysalis, the body hangs perfectly straight. His pentacles – tentacles hang perfectly straight down. And what you see way back here in the corner is that green shell –

[return to the photo of the six stages of making a chrysalis]

– beginning to form. It continues to push up and push up and push up. When it gets to the fourth stage – the fifth stage up here, the skin that theyve – that is pushed off forms this little tiny thing up here, which is called the cremaster, which attaches it to the top of the cage. When he gets to here, he does what’s called a wiggle-jiggle dance. And what he’s doing then, I think, is just trying to accommodate himself to the shell that he’s just put himself in.

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

And here is the final chrysalis. It’s a very sturdy and long-lived cage. We go to the U.P. and go to my brother’s nine miles on a logging road. I have never had a chrysalis fall off the cage. They’re very, very sturdy structures.

This one. Some of them are very lazy. This is the bottom of the cage.

[slide featuring a photo of a chrysalis that has formed on the back of a milkweed leaf]

There is the top way up there. This guy said: Eh, I’m tired. I really don’t exactly feel like going to the top of the cage. So, he made his chrysalis on the back of the leaf. I had to attach the leaf to the top of the cage. It subsequently died – dried up and died – but the caterpillar hatched just fine. He had no problem doing it.

[new slide featuring a photo of the top of one of Gaes cages and showing what several cremasters look like from the top looking down]

This is the top of one of my cages. There are six chrysalises up on the top. Here, here, here. These have hatched. There’s one way over here. This is the zipper down here at the bottom. So, you can see that I’m very happy that it’s up there because when I open and close the cage, I’m not disturbing the chrysalises.

[new slide with a photo showing a close-up of a chrysalis]

When – and this lasts for about 10 to 14 days in the chrysalis. If we’re going to go away and somebody has just gone into chrysalis, I don’t have to take that one with us because I know that I’ve got a week or two before it’s going to hatch. When – and isn’t this a gorgeous thing up here? Every single chrysalis has this lovely, lovely gold bracelet. Don’t know why. It’s pretty.

When it’s going to change, what it does – the – the chrysalis cage begins to get darker, and pretty soon the next thing you see –

[new slide featuring a photo of older chrysalis that has become dark at the top and transparent at the bottom so that you can see the wings of the butterfly]

– are wings. The chrysalis gets lighter, you can see the wings, and the final thing that happens –

[new slide featuring a photo of a newly hatched Monarch butterfly emerged from the chrysalis]

– is the butterfly hatches. Look at the size of the thorax, look at the length of its wings. They’re usually double that. These wings need to be left alone and the butterfly needs to hang and dry its wings.

[new slide featuring a photo of the last five stages of the butterfly as it emerges from the chrysalis]

This is what it looks like in sequence. When the butterfly has hatched you need to leave it alone and don’t do anything with it for at least couple hours. Sometimes they say up to 24 hours. That’s no problem.

You’ll know sometimes when it’s ready to move around because it lets go from here and it’s crawling around the top of your container. So, it’s no problem.

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

That’s the equivalent of this. If you want to look at this. [holding up a bunch of empty chrysalises that are woven together] This – this goes like this. And that one on the picture goes upside down too. This is the web that it weaves up on top. They’re all so close together – you can come up and look at this later – that it’s a – its a steady, solid, woven patch. It’s absolutely lovely. And each one of these is hatched; all the chrysalises are empty. And that’s what’s fun.

[slide showing a photo of a multitude of empty chrysalises on a paper towel]

That’s what this is. And if it were turned upside down, they’d all be hanging.

[new slide featuring a photo of a multitude of Monarch tags]

When the monarchs have hatched and are healthy, I apply to the University of Kansas to Monarch Watch, and I buy tags. This is what they look like on a sheet. They are numbered and lettered so that if and when they are ever retrieved in Mexico, they will know where they’ve come from and what kind of journey they’ve had – theyve had to get to Mexico. So far, I haven’t had –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– one reported found. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t, but it wasn’t found.

The tag goes on the distal –

[slide featuring a photo of Gae attaching a tag to a Monarch butterfly]

– cell – discal cell of the monarch butterfly. It’s shaped like a – a glove. You’ll see it later. Put it on – I put it on with a – with a toothpick, and you –

[new slide featuring a photo of Gae pressing the tag on a Monarch butterfly]

– press it for a couple of seconds, let it down, hold it down, let a monarch – a monarch go. It’s gone.

[new slide featuring a photo of a vase of flowers in a Monarch cage with Monarch butterflies surrounding it]

Monarch butterflies don’t like to fly in temperatures less than 56 degrees. So, come Fall, if we’ve got a bad day and we’ve got a monarch which needs to go, I bring in flowers, put it in the cage, and hope they’ll get some nectar from it, and feed. However –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– when they don’t, I say, “Okay, I guess I got to do it myself.”

So, this is kind of fun. Marianne and I learned how to do this last summer and I’d never done it before. This is a jar lid.

[slide featuring a photo of a Monarch butterfly on top of a jar lid that has saturated paper on top of it]

In – in it is a paper towel that is saturated with a 20% sugar solution. I just used hummingbird nectar. Put it in there. Put the monarch butterfly in there. They taste with their feet. So, if this one says, Hey, this tastes good! I’m going to put my proboscis down. And you can see where it is, down at the very bottom.

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

He’s eating. This is in the – this is in the juice, and he’s sucking up the moisture – the water here, the fluid. This one is doing the same thing.

[slide featuring a photo of a different tagged Monarch butterfly on top of a jar lid that has a wet piece of paper towel on it]

He was also hungry. Sometimes if they’re not hungry and they keep their proboscis curled up like this, I’ll take a toothpick and just push it in and push it down. Open up the proboscis and then they start feeding. It’s kind of fun.

And –

[new slide featuring a photo of Gae dipping the feet of a Monarch butterfly in a small dish of water]

– when they’re done, you swish their feet in clear water because they don’t want to have sugar on their feet. I go Swoosh, swoosh! Isn’t that cool? [laughing] Yeah, it doesn’t seem to bother them either.

[new slide featuring a photo of a Monarch butterfly on top of some flowers with its wings spread horizontally]

Okay, do you know the difference between a male and female?

[new slide featuring a photo of a smaller Monarch butterfly on some leaves with its wings spread horizontally]

Size –

[return to the slide with the larger Monarch sitting on top of the flowers]

– sometimes is the difference, but most of the time it’s not. This is a female –

[return to the slide with the smaller Monarch sitting on the leaves]

– and this is a male. Can you tell the difference?

[crowd mumbling]

The two spots. The male is the only one that has the two spots. Apparently, scientists don’t know what they’re for, but they’re there.

[return to the slide featuring the photo of the female Monarch on the flowers]

The female may have thicker veins. She may not. But the main way you can tell –

[return to the slide featuring the photo of the male Monarch butterfly on the leaves]

– is for the spots on the – on the male.

[new slide featuring a photo of a Monarch butterfly perched on the back of Gaes hand]

This little guy said, Thank you. I’m out of here! But first I got to say goodbye.

[new slide featuring a photo of several blooming milkweed plants]

In order to grow monarch butterflies [chuckling] you need to grow milkweed. This is swamp milkweed in the front yard. It’s usually pink, this one turned white. I’m delighted that it did. It is a nectar plant for the monarchs. It’s also a – a place to lay their eggs.

[new slide featuring a photo of orange bloomed butterfly weed in Gaes garden]

This is butterfly weed, which most of you know. It – it comes in shades of yellow to bright orange. It is a perennial; comes back every year. It’s a nectar plant. It’s also –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– where they can lay their eggs. This is swamp milkweed again. These are –

[new slide featuring a photo of swamp milkweed plants in Gaes backyard]

– also nectar plants. They’re very, very good for – they like to lay the eggs even on the flowers, so I have to watch those too.

[new slide featuring a photo of the curassavica in Gaes garden]

This is curassavica. This is a tropical milkweed, and that’s what this one is here. It doesn’t grow here. It’s tropical. So that, when I – when I have it out in the yard, I have to bring it in and overwinter it –

[shot of a curassavica plant at the venue of the talk]

– in the house. Sometimes it does what the other ones do; it makes itself make seeds. So, I keep those, but they don’t have to be cold –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– stratified the way the other ones do. So, I can just replant them and hope that it grows. It’s a tropical milkweed. You can buy the seeds too, I believe. I – I haven’t had to buy any for a while because I’ve kept these things going.

So, the journey continues. What do we do next? The first thing we do is plant milkweed. Try not to use pesticides.

[slide titled – The Journey Continues Whats next? – featuring a photo of a Monarch butterfly roosting on milkweed and the following bulleted list – Plant milkweed; Eliminate pesticides; Plant milkweed; Add nectar plants; Plant milkweed; Convert lawn to habitat; Plant milkweed; Create roadside habitats; Plant milkweed; Certify your yard as a Waystation; Plant milkweed]

It’s just whatever you’re going to use can also do a number on your cat – on your butterflies. Plant some milkweed. Add nectar plants. Anything that has nectar on it the butterflies will thank you for because it’s their food. Plant some milkweed. Convert some of your lawn to butterfly habitat. Twenty-eight million [chuckling] acres in this country are nothing but lawns. They don’t have to be that. Plant some milkweed. Convert some of your lawn to habitat. Plant some milkweed. Create roadside habitats. Every – every time you turn around, you see the –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– cutters going down the highway. They’re cutting down everything in sight next to the fields. And if we were to plant – if we were to plant native plants along there, in the long run there would be fewer amounts of maintenance that would have to be done to those roadside gardens. Plant some milkweed. Certify your yard as a Monarch Way station. Ive got – it’s a very simple process; you tell them what – what – what you have in your yard, how many hours of sunshine you have, how many kinds of flowers you have. It’s very easy to be certified, and it’s kind of a bragging point to say, “My yard is a Monarch Waystation.” And then, you can also plant milkweed.

[audience chuckling]

Do you sense a theme here?

[laughter]

Super.

Well, that’s sort of the end of my program, but I – what I’d like to say is with all the pessimistic numbers about monarch butterflies and their demise, it makes us wonder if we’re ever going to get any better. Will it help? Will we get any further?

This sentence came from the National Wildlife Federation –

[slide titled – Remember! – featuring the following statement – The loss of any species weakens the ecosystem that all species rely on for survival, including humans]

– and I – I like this very much.

If we don’t have them, we’re losing.

[new slide titled – Informative Websites with the following list – www.monarchwatch.org; www.journeynorth.org; www.monarchjointventure.org; www.youtube.com/user/MrLundScience]

I’ve also given you some websites to look for. These are the four that I use the most. Monarch Watch is the one in the University of Kansas. What it does is give you the best program for raising and rearing, releasing monarch butterflies. They are very, very good, and very – it’s also very free. Monarch – Journey North is the one that – and it’s in the Fall, Journey South. It tells you what is going on. You can go online and find out –

[Gae Bergmann, on-camera]

– from them where people have located first milkweed, first eggs, first adult butterfly. And you can go online and look up where people have seen these things, and then you can also post that you’ve seen something. It’s kind of fun.

Monarch Joint Venture is an organization of more than 30 groups of research, education, conservation which are trying to keep the pollinators alive in this country. And the last one is a YouTube. –

[return to the slide with the websites]

– Mr. Science [chuckling] I just found this recently. It’s delightful. He is – Jeff – Rich Lund is a science teacher in Mount Johns, Michigan. He’s done a series of five videos from collecting seeds to catching butterflies, to raising them, to releasing them. He does a really good job, and he has some very nice close-ups of some of the things. For example, one of the ones is the – the caterpillar coming out of the egg and watching him chow down on his – on his shell. Theyre kind of fun sites. And they are interesting because they’re hands-on, and he’s very knowledgeable.

I have to tell you one of the things that he does. This cracked me up. He had a cage about like this. He cut out a slit in the bottom and he set it over a couple of milkweed plants. He, like I, has spent a great deal of time beating the bushes and going around the countryside looking for eggs and caterpillars. Even though I had a lot of milkweed in my yard, I didn’t have any eggs sometimes.

So, he set this cage over a couple of milkweed plants. Caught a female butterfly. He said, I think probably she’s found a boyfriend. He didn’t know for sure. He put her in the cage and left it in there from 11 in the morning until 7 at night. When he – this is in one of the videos – when he finished, he very carefully pulls the – he – yeah, he took the – let the caterpillar go – he let the butterfly go, he pulled the cage up, and found some eggs on his milkweed that had been covered with this cage. His wife is doing the videoing and she’s saying, “Rich, ah, this is more than you’ve ever had before. Well, he got done counting eggs and [laughing] he had 90 eggs, every one of which hatched.

[audience murmuring]

And his wife said, “What are you going to do about this?” He said, “It’s a work-in-progress.”

[laughter]

But that to me – I want to do that this year. If I can’t find any that’s a great way to do it.

But anyway, that’s the story of my journey. I hope some of you will try to take on a journey too because if we don’t, we’re not going to have any more butterflies. Parenthetically – this is my last point and I’m so excited. I went on Journey North to – yesterday, looked up sightings. At this point, as of yesterday, adult butterflies have been sighted in Wisconsin Rapids, New London, Black Earth, Waunakee, and Waukesha. Guess what, guys? [laughing] We’re going to start a new journey!

Thank you.

[applause]