Monarch butterflies are commonly seen in North America. They are good pollinators and belong to the Nymphalidae family. These butterflies have introduced themselves like Milkweed, Black Veined Brown, Wanderer, and Common Tiger.
The life cycle of insects is undoubtedly a wonderful creation of nature. The benefits of humanizing monarch butterflies help to increase the beauty of the patio in addition to the reproduction of plants, especially in agriculture through pollination. Let’s check out how they can be cultivated through their whole life cycle.
Attraction Step:
Monarch butterflies are attracted by the Milkweed plant. Interestingly, Milkweed acts as magnetism cause as well as the host plant (the plants where insects lay their eggs and which are being eaten by the larvae of the insects to grow themselves up) for monarch butterflies.
To attract monarch butterflies, a single milkweed plant is useless. We need a whole bunch of milkweed plants to attract them more in numbers.
Raising Step:
If you are humanizing monarch butterflies and have female butterflies, then you can attract male butterflies for mating purposes. Else, you can attract adult female butterflies to lay their eggs in your yard. Cultivation of butterflies always goes through 4 stages.
The eggs are usually pale yellow or bright green in colour. They are maximum 1 mm to 2 mm in length. Female monarch butterflies can lay an average of 1200 eggs at a time which are normally 0.2 mg of each. They lay eggs under the juvenile leaves of milkweed plants which help them to nourish and give protection from predators.
After 3 to 8 days larvae are also recognized as Caterpillars hatch from the eggs. At that time, they continuously eat their host plant to develop. This stage is called the larval stage, which is the second stage. After continuously eating the milkweed plant’s leaves for 2 weeks, they start to convert themselves in the pupa.
The third stage is chrysalis or pupa formation. During this stage, the caterpillar starts to secret some kind of silky layer around their body which has green colour and some golden dots below. In this stage, the exoskeleton of that chrysalis is soft, which becomes solidified within a day.
At normal temperature, the pupa is going to emerge within 2 weeks from the pupa formation day.
Releasing Stage:
This fourth stage is the final stage to form the adult monarch butterfly; this is reckoned as the most important stage also. Most of the body parts are being produced inside the chrysalis. Before releasing the butterfly, pupa turns into bluish. Within 12 hours the butterfly comes with black, white, and orange wings.
Conclusion:
Monarch butterflies not only increase the business of the yard but also help in pollination and by eating harmful insects in agriculture. There are so many established organizations that cultivate monarch butterflies regularly for this reason. They have a short life span of one week but in this short time and they contribute a huge to the ecosystem.
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