Monarch caterpillars are big eaters. When they reach one inch long they can eat one leaf every hour! They can eat Milkweeds to the ground. Devouring the flowers, leaves, seed pods, and even the stems.
In just a few hours they stripped this plant of it’s leaves.
The eighty caterpillars I was raising quickly ate up my five milkweed plants. My mom found a local nursery in Seminole County that sells Milkweeds. She bought eleven! I was very excited.
To my surprise they ate the eleven new plants too! Most of them were big enough to make their chrysalises. The few caterpillars that still needed more food I put on my milkweeds planted out in my garden box. The reason I ran out of food is because I thought I had forty caterpillars when I really had eighty!
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