The cage I slapped together did keep Momma Monarch away from my personal stash of Milkweed. What it didn't do is keep Momma's little babies from wandering in and eating their fill.
What is this blather?
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
In this case what I had done wrong was to leave some exposed Milkweed on my front porch. I used up my supply of hardware cloth to build an ugly steel cage around my personal Milkweed.
Caterpillars don't share. Just ask any farmer. The milkweed I left on the porch drew lots of Monarchs. Beautiful critters, really. That is why I plant and propagate the stuff, to help the butterflies.
Very low effort hobby. I can watch the little beauties fly in on the breeze from my easy chair in the front room of my house. Momma floats on in, finds the exposed Milkweed, drops an egg on a leaf, and moves on to the next plant.
In reality she drops a couple eggs and lets Darwin take charge. You hatch first, you get the tasty leaves. You hatch last, you get eaten by a brother or sister who eats the plant you are stuck under.
It has worked for millennia this way. I can't change them.
You see the issue. My personal stash within the milkweed cage was adjacent to the exposed plants. The caterpillars hatched, ate those plants, then moved on to mine.
Only two caterpillars got in the cage, and ate about half of my milkweed. Greedy little beauties.
They left their jade colored chrysalis behind. One was inside the cage, the female. The male came back out of the cage and wandered up the leg of a plastic chair on my porch.
Both did hatch from the pupa. Both fledged and flew away.
My neighborhood in the land named after flowers has lots of butterfly friendly flowers. Who knows, maybe my butterfly's children generations removed may come back and grace my yard.
Hopefully I will get my seeds that I was looking for in the first place. You know, so I can grow some more milkweed?
Greedy little beauties that you are.
Just leave me a little, Huh?
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