Busy Season
I know I’ve neglected my blog for a couple of weeks, but business has been picking up here at Kaleidoscope Kisses monarch waystation. Not as busy as last year by a long ways, but still better than nothing.
Our number of eggs has remained low, at a worrisome level. Even my neighbor that has a yard full of milkweed was getting very few eggs. We only had any measurable activity for about 3 days. Those few days, we would find up to 20 or so eggs. Considering last year we were gathering over a hundred eggs on most days for two weeks, 20 eggs is basically nothing.
At least we had enough to have a couple of good releases, with 34 yesterday and probably close to that many today, we’re still waiting to make sure everyones wings are dry before we know for sure. I have about 50 more caterpillars, including 5 or so first instar and then I’m done for the year. We’ll be pretty well finished by the end of the month. The last two years, we were releasing butters well into November, so this isn’t much of a showing. I still have a couple of hundred milkweed plants with no one to eat them!
The excitement of the week, was a day spent with an award winning production crew, filming an episode on pollinators for PBS. Between our eggs, and some that I got from my monarch friend, I was able to show them the process in all of the stages except for any adults to release. We’re filming our releases over a few days and sending them the footage for the program, EcoSense for Living. I’m not sure when it will be out, but will definitely post here when it’s available to watch.
