Raising Book Resources
Raising Hope for the 2021 Monarch Migration- Raise The Migration Results
Raise The Migration is an annual North American challenge to raise monarch butterflies to release for fall’s annual monarch migration. The time has come to share your 2021 experience and raise it forward…
The raising season is coming to an end, so we’d love to hear how many butterflies you released for fall’s annual 2021 monarch migration…and more importantly, what lessons you’ve learned through this amazing raising experience?
If you’ve still got some raising to do, raise on! But please post in the comment box at the bottom of this page after you’ve released your last butterfly.
Every year, I start Raise The Migration in July, but monarchs raised at that time aren’t actually migration generation butterflies…they’re the parents to that amazing generation of travelers.
There’s no way to tell whether butterflies will mate or migrate, but one telltale sign of a migration generation butterfly is its size, which is dependent on how much the caterpillar eats. The first super-sized caterpillars start to form chrysalides around the first week of September in our northern region…
In the garden, you can tell non-migratory butterflies by their worn out wings. Non-migratory males are also more aggressive, chasing off potential competition while seeking out female companionship…migratory monarchs are in sexual diapause and only interested in stocking up on nectar for the long journey ahead.
So how did our Raise The Migration Monarchs fare this season and what lessons did we learn raising forward?
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If you’re interested in a step-by-step guide digital guide with free updates (before each monarch season begins in spring) please check out the monarch raising guide by clicking this butterfly photo:
For anyone who purchases the guide (or any other item) from Monarch Butterfly Life, you will be invited to our closed facebook group where you can discuss raising monarchs with other raisers and post your photos.
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Here are Raise the Migration results from the past eight seasons:
2020- 82% survival rate
2019- 81% survival rate
2018- 93% survival rate
2017- 100% survival rate
2016- 96% survial rate
2015- 96% survival rate
2014- 90% survival rate
2013- 100% survival rate
As you can see from the results, this raising system is consistently producing healthy monarchs to help support the struggling monarch population.
Raise The Migration 2021 Results
I released 15 healthy monarchs (14 females and 1 male) from July 29th to August 16th with a 100% survival rate. I am fairly certain all of these butterflies were parents to the migration generation.
The seven monarchs we raised after that, were counted as our official Raise The Migration monarchs for 2021...
Caterpillar Escapes
By keeping monarch eggs and baby caterpillars in sealed food containers, and raising larger caterpillars in the mesh cages, we never lose caterpillars.
I think the closest we have come was two years ago when I forgot to close a cage door and found a caterpillar crawling on top of the cage. 🐛 😱
Unexplained Caterpillar Deaths
We didn't have any unexplained monarch deaths in 2021.
Caterpillar Diseases and Parasites?
I'm happy to report no disease issues in 2021. All of our raise the migration participants were brought in as eggs so no issues with tachinid flies...a couple eggs were parasitized by trichogramma wasps, and we discarded those eggs when they darkened and never hatched.
Accidental Deaths?
We experienced one accidental (and completely preventable) accidental death. See the Butterfly Eclosure section below for more details...
Chrysalis Problems
No chrysalis issues to report in 2021...
Community member Jude R. recently used the microfiber method to rehang one of her fallen chrysalides:
Jude reports: There was zero silk and I wasn't sure what to do. Your tip worked and just in time. I was a little worried the bfly's feet would get stuck in the microfiber, but it had zero problems.
Butterfly Eclosures
We had one eclosure disaster this year. An early morning butterfly (emerged from chrysalis before 7am) fell from our kitchen overhang on to the floor.
She lost a lot of fluids from her abdomen when this happened. Her wings recovered 'somewhat' when I hung her from inside a mesh cage, but she was injured badly from the fall on to the wood floor, which is about a 7 foot drop.
Starting in 2022, we will no longer rehang chrysalides on our overhang. It's much safer to rehang them inside the cage where they can crawl up a mesh wall after falling a much shorter distance.
Final Results
Our totals are from all eggs that have successfully hatched. We don't count eggs that were parasitized outside or monarchs brought in as caterpillars because they could have parasites too.
Seven monarch butterflies emerged from their chrysalides between August 29th and October 5th:
1 accidental death (butterfly fall)
0 disease or parasite issues
0 unexplained deaths
4 healthy males
2 healthy females
86% survival rate
Lessons Learned?
Chrysalides should always be kept in a cage or somewhere where the butterfly has a chance to climb to safety if it falls after it emerges. In my experience butterflies rarely fall, but it can happen.
Migration Memory 2021
I came across these mating monarchs in our Minnesota garden on September 19th when it was an unseasonable 90°:
Before 2021, I had never seen mating past the first week of September in our region.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my Raise The Migration '21 results and lessons learned raising monarchs through the butterfly life cycle .
And now, I'd love to hear about your experience...
Share Your Results?! ✍️
Please share your results below by letting us know how many monarchs you released to help boost the struggling monarch population…remember to include your location.
More importantly, please share the most valuable lesson(s) you learned about raising monarch butterflies, that you believe can help others raising forward.
Thank you for helping to Raise the Migration in 2021
338 comments
This is my third year collecting tiny monarch caterpillars from the milkweed I planted in my backyard garden ten years ago and raising them in net cages on my front porch in Willoughby, Ohio. I released 34 lovely monarchs in the last few months, the last on September 10th!
Hi again I am in Alexandria, Virginia. 22306.
Last year I didn’t see monarchs until late end of August.I had. put my faves away thinking the season was over. I had planted lots of milk weed but no monarchs until very late AUGUST. Then all of a sudden there many. Under releasing about fifty healthy monarch s early Oct. By then it was getting cool . This year I’ve seen no eggs only five monarchs recently. I had plenty of different kinds of milkweed that looked great. Butterfly bush, Mexican sun flowers. Thank you for your information. I have all sizes of mesh cages and growing tubes . They were very helpful last year. Do you know why we didn’t see many this year? It was very hot all summer 80 to 99. And lots of rain. Judy
I’d like to address the degraded common milkweed problem with a “fix” I accidentally discovered this year. I’m a Master Gardener in Forsyth Co, NC. We generally see monarchs here in measurable numbers in late summer. I grow A. syriaca (common), A. tuberosa (butterflyweed), A. incarnata (swamp), and this year I grew A. curassavica (Mexican) because we have reliable killing frosts in fall. I had my first female visit April 14 (that was an FOY in our county), and she was ovipositing. I collected her eggs and successfully released 15 butterflies early summer. After a very long hiatus with few of any butterfly sightings, the monarchs appeared again August 1. I collected 62 eggs that time around and released 56 healthy butterflies. Far and away, the favored egg site was my common milkweed even though the Mexican milkweed was luscious and abundant. But they picked the common because I’d done something I’d never tried before
July 4, the day I usually cut the rampant common stalks back (just after bloom), I pulled them up out of the ground because they were overtaking my garden. I figured that even though the common would be gone in August, there was plenty more host plant material with the three other varieties. But what happened next turned out to be my profound learning experience. Within three weeks of pulling the plants out, they resprouted with luscious, hunky new growth – as if they were starting all over again. They were fresh and clean enough in that first week of August that I could feed them to hungry cats without the usual deterioration I usually have to contend with. In some cases, I pulled the plants TWICE and they still resprouted! I observed that these resprouted, fresh common milkweeds were by far the most favored egg sights, even when growing right next to the curassavica. Next year, my strategy will be to PULL, not cut, every single A. syriaca I have growing in the garden. It helped with aphids (not nearly so many), with milkweed bugs (none at all on the resprouted material), and with inviting egg-laying spots. Plus I got really healthy cats!
We released:
July – 3
August – 56
September – should be about 160-170 from September when finished
I bring in eggs every day and have experimented this year with various ways to keep them healthy:
Method 1 – keep in covered condiment cups until 2nd instar – problems with eggs rotting, cannot find the eggs when the leaves curl up, etc. Labor intensive.
Method 2 – keep in uncovered condiment cups until the eggs turn dark, then add fresh fragment of milkweed and cover until hatching – then move immediately to net enclosure with milkweed stalk. This had high survival rate but it is very hard to find and relocate the tiny hatchlings. No problem with rot or fungus. I may have lost a few who hatched before I noticed. I could not remove the original stalk of milkweed for days even though it started wilting, because the cats were too small to find them all. Just added more milkweed stalks.
Method 3 – putting the eggs on milkweed leaves in the net enclosure. This worked surprisingly well with very little effort. I used common milkweed so that it would stay fresh long enough for the eggs to hatch. The downside: I could not change the milkweed, fearing that tiny cats were on it. I had to keep adding new stalks so that the enclosure got rather full before they were big enough to find them all and remove old milkweed.
Other thoughts:
The milkweed that contains the egg tends to curl up so I started using a hole punch to just put the smallest amount of milkweed around the egg and this worked much better.
Next year, I will experiment with the second and third method and keep better records to report to you.
I have swamp, common, and tropical milkweed. Almost all eggs were on the tropical, which also stayed green and fresh (and blooming) for feeding caterpillars throughout September. I had about 25 tropical milkweed plants.
Aphids were a terrible problem on the common milkweed in spite of my best squishing efforts. Toward the end of the season, they started moving to the tropical but I was able to keep them under control by squishing every day.
Lindalee Brownstein
Columbus OH