This season at our stores, we were fortunate to watch the Monarch Life cycle in its entirety. As of 8/16/21 all of our Monarch caterpillars have emerged from their chrysalis and laid several more eggs on our Milkweed plants. Those eggs have now hatched and we had 100+ new baby Monarch caterpillars!
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough Milkweed to support that many caterpillars, So a decision was taken to relocate them to a place where there would be plenty of Milkweed for them.
This week, one of our Lenexa employees, Julie Roberts (who is also a high school science teacher), collected the baby caterpillars in a container. She then took them to Shawnee Mission Park and, one by one, carefully placed the caterpillars on native Milkweed at the park…2-3 caterpillars per plant. It took her over an hour to do this! But you can see that the Milkweed at this park is plentiful, so the caterpillars will be much happier!