- Good evening and thank you for coming to the Dodge County
County Master Gardener Association monthly meeting.
My name is Carol Shirk,
but I would like to introduce Gae Bergmann to you.
She is one of our own, and she is going to be speaking tonight
on raising magnificent monarchs.
She's been a Dodge County master gardener for nine years.
She's raised monarchs nearly all that time,
and she has raised and released 500 or more of them
on her Fox Lake property.
She has four varieties of milkweed on her property
as well as a large number of flowers on her property as well.
This has resulted in her property being declared--
being certified as a Monarch Way station.
Tonight she's going to share the reasons why it's essential to
begin raising these beautiful insects.
She's going to talk about the life stages of the monarchs.
She's going to talk about the procedures to follow for you to
have success and why it's important for each one of us to
be involved with that.
And also why it's necessary for you to plant milkweed
in this process as well.
So without further ado, I would like to introduce Gae Bergmann.
[applause, whistling, laughing]
>> Oh, goodness.
Well, this is sort of a passion of mine
that I don't know how it came about particularly,
except I had a daughter who said, "Hey, Mom,
what do you think about these things in this little jar?"
I said, "Okay, fine, I can try those."
And unbeknownst to me, there was some milkweed on our property.
That began this long journey.
All right.
Monarchs matter.
Most butterflies, most insects, actually, matter,
but some of them matter more than others.
As far as I'm concerned, monarchs are the most important,
of course.
They have been around for more than 50 million years,
which just boggles your mind.
They're part of our basic biodiversity
in this land of ours.
They have been part of literature for...
since the Bible was prepared.
Bible, Shakespeare, modern day.
It evokes words like peace, beauty, freedom.
Educationally, they are kind of fun because
when they get into the classroom and the kids start learning
about monarch butterflies, they are enthralled.
Monarch butterflies are important pollinators.
They are part of the health of our ecosystems.
If we don't have pollinators we are in deep trouble.
I'm going to go to economic first.
One of the most important things about the economy
of certain countries is the trips that people take
to see the butterflies which are roosting in the trees.
And on November 1,
that is called The Day of the Dead in November.
And this is the day that many Mexicans feel that the coming,
returning butterflies,
each one holds the soul of one of its dead people,
one of its ancestors.
The ecology is one of the reasons,
and has three major ones behind it,
as to why the dearth of butterflies is occurring.
The first thing that happens that we can't do anything
about are the severe weather systems that pass through.
This year in March, early March a horrendous storm
went through over wintering sites in central Mexico--
El Rosario was one, there are two others--
which literally devastated those sites.
The butterflies on the trees
were killed as the trees went down.
The butterflies on the ground
were covered with snow and ice and died.
One of the estimates says that
from 3% to 50% of all the monarchs were killed.
We won't know until the end of the summer,
but we hope it's not that bad.
This is a picture of one of those sites
which showed how the logging has...
This is salvage logging,
actually they've taken out some of the trees.
But you can see in the background
that those are the oyamel forest... oyamel fir trees,
and they literally are up.
This is a very dead piece of land right now.
At the same time there is an awful lot of illegal logging
going on in the over wintering sites.
For example, last year we had...
Ooh, this is fun... [laughter]
0.67 hectares of monarchs roosting
in the over wintering sites.
Two years ago.
Last year, we were back to 1.3 hectares.
A hectare is equal to about 2 1/2 acres.
Look back to the tall one:
18 hectares way back in the 90s.
So you can see why
we're having a little problem trying to get them restored.
Another main problem, unfortunately,
is in this country.
We've lost 147 million acres of cropland and grassland
in this country in 25 years.
A lot of this is due to development,
whether it's commercial, residential, business.
They're just plain gone.
They're not there anymore.
And I hate to throw stones,
but there are some things called genetically modified organisms
that have to do with farmers and their fields.
Those things kill everything, including milkweed.
This is a picture of a milkweed plant
that's been hit by some kind of chemical, I have no idea what.
But it doesn't look too healthy.
Now we're starting our journey.
Along about the middle of February and March,
the monarchs begin to move from their over wintering sites
down in central Mexico.
They will get up as far as Texas, Colorado,
the southernmost states that we have,
and there they will [laughing]
do funny things like this.
You can see.
[whispering]
This wing is gone.
This color is pretty much decimated.
This wing right here is completely gone.
They can fly, this one isn't too healthy either,
but their main purpose in life right now
is to mate, lay eggs, and die.
The next generation will do the same thing as it moves north.
This will happen two or three more times
until they get to Wisconsin and even up into Canada,
which is a wonderful site.
Now on my journey,
I kind of have a lot of milkweed ready to go.
I don't see anything.
My milkweed is healthy.
Where the heck are the butterflies?
[chuckling]
Unbeknownst to me, some female showed up one day,
and I never saw her.
She laid eggs on all the umbels that are in this container.
They were on milkweed plants,
and only 5 to 10% of all the eggs which are hatched
actually survive.
It's a horrible, horrible number,
whether it's predators or whether you name it,
not many of them survive.
So now I know there's been one in my yard.
Now my milkweed is blooming.
That doesn't look too bad.
And if you've ever been anywhere near a milkweed patch like this,
the fragrance is fantastic.
It's just a wonderful, wonderful smell.
It's lovely.
We also have a patch in our front yard.
We also have a resident woodchuck.
[murmuring]
What he does is turn the stem over, chew off the leaves,
and let it return to its upright position.
So we had to fence that in.
We haven't caught him yet, we're working on it.
Milkweed is a rhizome, so it grows underground.
Over here is my... Whoa!
Back up... Over here is my milkweed patch.
This is a cement sidewalk, that's the side of our house.
The milkweed grew underneath the sidewalk and up there.
Isn't that cool?
Holy cow! June 3 last year, [chuckling]
I saw my first monarch butterfly,
so now I go out and I start chasing her around.
If you're looking for a monarch egg,
this is a very large picture of one.
I tell people to look for small, pale green,
football-shaped eggs.
They're usually underneath the leaf, they're not on top.
Sometimes they fool you.
But this is a large one and this gives you the shape of it.
This picture I took because...
this is the size of an egg underneath a milkweed leaf.
Each one of these has an egg on it.
There's one up here, there, there,
here, and this one right here.
Let's see if I can do this next.
I collect leaves from wherever I can get them.
I wash them off, put them on paper towels,
put them in a plastic bag.
They stay fresh that way for quite a long time
and don't need to be...
you don't have to constantly be going outside
to pick more leaves.
When I get leaves with eggs on them,
I will take a small piece of paper towel, wet,
put it around the end of the leaf to keep it fresh,
and then I'll put a little piece of foil on the end.
These in the middle container have been treated.
They are all eggs on that one.
The top one has not had their ends sealed.
And because it's such a stressful job,
a little homemade sangria never hurt. [laughter]
This is half of what my kitchen counter
usually looks like on my journey.
The containers that you put your monarch caterpillars in
and eggs don't make any difference when they're small.
You do need to aerate them, ventilate the containers.
So I poke a hole from the inside out
because when they go up to the top,
you don't want them to impale their little selves
on the plastic that's on the bottom.
You can put them in glass jars, you can put them in anything.
I put them in any kind of plastic container
that's available.
The smaller they are, the smaller the container can be,
so that's no problem.
The ones in the back are absolutely wonderful containers.
They're all these pretzel containers.
And so when the caterpillars get large enough
that they're going to go into chrysalis, I put them in there
because when they hatch from the chrysalis
they need to hang it down and have their wings dry.
This is what...
this is a very big picture also...
this is what a monarch egg looks like when it's about to hatch.
From the time you see an egg, it may hatch in a half hour,
it may hatch four days later.
This is the head of the caterpillar.
When he comes through this egg,
he will turn around and eat the egg
because it has a great deal of nutrition in it for him.
These are pictures of caterpillars
which have hatched and done this.
This one has done the same thing.
What they do... which absolutely fascinates me...
They eat a hole in the leaf, they eat a circle.
This is called trenching.
And what that means is they cut the milkweed into a circle.
They cut off the supply of latex that's in the leaf
because the latex is so sticky
their little tiny mandibles can become stuck together.
And they can't eat.
So they cut off the fluid, eat what's in the center,
and then they have enough strength and size to be able to
go to the edge of next leaf and start working on it.
When they get large enough...
and there's a bunch of eating on this leaf...
they need new leaves.
So what I do is cut a small piece around each caterpillar,
put it on this edge down here.
And this guy I had on here took it probably from here,
put him down here,
and he was ready to go onto a new leaf anyway.
He didn't like it on that one
because it was an old leaf and it wasn't that fresh anymore.
He wanted a new one.
This is not my cage.
When caterpillars eat, they also poop.
Poop is called frass, F-R-A-S-S.
That's frass.
This is a cage that should have been cleaned out days ago. [chuckling]
There are four caterpillars on here,
each of whom has probably
decimated that leaf stuff as much as it possibly could.
What I would do would be to pick up the stalk,
put them on the counter...
because they don't go anywhere,
they just crawl very slowly...
pick up this thing, put down a new paper towel,
and clean the whole thing out.
Maybe it needs to be washed.
Cages should be kept dry, they should be kept clean,
and they should be full of leaves for your caterpillars.
This is parenthetical.
At the end of the summer,
the burrs were beginning to go into pods,
and I just happened to see this little guy out there.
I thought, "Holy cow, that's really cool"
because I'm about done with this.
But I looked, I brought in about 10 of these pods,
put them in the house.
They all had eggs on them and they all hatched,
which was kind of nice.
The caterpillars go through five instars.
Each time it does, it goes to the top of the cage,
attaches itself for a while, loses its skin...
because the skin is too small...
eats the skin,
and then proceeds to come back down.
That's called an instar.
It does it five times.
When the caterpillar is about 2 inches tall...
this is about the time he goes into a big cage...
he grows into one of these guys.
Because I want him to go up to the top,
I want him to be safe up here.
This to me is a fascinating process.
When the caterpillar is about to go into chrysalis,
he goes to the top of whatever cage it is
and weaves a very sticky mat across the top.
It's fascinating in that
there is this little white button that attaches up there.
And he hangs up there in a "J".
And you know that the J is going to be the beginning
of his going into chrysalis.
This could last for about 24 hours.
He could be two days hanging in the J.
If you jiggle the cage, he'll go Thwok!
like this, and he curls up and then
he curls back down again.
When he's about to go into chrysalis,
the body hangs perfectly straight.
His tentacles hang perfectly straight down.
And what you see way back here in the corner
is that green shell beginning to form.
It continues to push up and push up and push up.
When it gets to the fifth stage up here,
the skin that is pushed off forms this little tiny thing
up here, which is called the cremaster,
which attaches it to the top of the cage.
When he gets to here,
he does what's called a wiggle-jiggle dance.
And what he's doing then, I think,
is just trying to accommodate himself
to the shell that he's just put himself in.
And here is the final chrysalis.
It's a very sturdy and long-lived cage.
We go to the U.P.
and go to my brother's nine miles on a logging road.
I have never had a chrysalis fall off the cage.
They're very, very sturdy structures.
[whispering] This one.
Some of them are very lazy.
This is the bottom of the cage.
There is a top way up there.
This guy said: Eh, I'm tired.
I really don't exactly feel like going to the top of the cage.
So he made his chrysalis on the back of the leaf.
I had to attach the leaf to the top of the cage.
It subsequently died-- dried up and died--
but the caterpillar hatched just fine.
He had no problem doing it.
This is the top of one of my cages.
There are six chrysalises up on the top.
Here, here, here.
These have hatched.
There's one way over here.
This is the zipper down here at the bottom.
So you can see that I'm very happy that it's up there
because when I open and close the cage
I'm not disturbing the chrysalises.
And this lasts for about 10 to 14 days in the chrysalis.
If we're going to go away
and somebody has just gone into chrysalis,
I don't have to take that one with us
because I know that I've got a week or two
before it's going to hatch.
And isn't this a gorgeous thing up here?
Every single chrysalis has this lovely, lovely gold bracelet.
Don't know why. It's pretty.
When it's going to change,
what it does is the chrysalis cage begins to get darker,
and pretty soon the next thing you see are wings.
The chrysalis gets lighter, you can see the wings,
and the final thing that happens is the butterfly hatches.
Look at the size of the thorax, look at the length of its wings.
They're usually double that.
These wings need to be left alone
and the butterfly needs to hang and dry its wings.
This is what it looks like in sequence.
When the butterfly has hatched you need to leave it alone
and don't do anything with it for at least couple hours.
Sometimes they say up to 24 hours.
That's no problem.
You'll know sometimes when it's ready to move around
because it lets go from here
and it's crawling around the top of your container.
So it's no problem.
That's the equivalent of this.
If you want look at this.
This goes like this.
And that one on the picture goes upside down too.
This is the web that it weaves up on top.
They're all so close together...
you can come up and look at this later...
that it's a steady, solid, woven patch.
It's actually lovely.
And each one of these is hatched;
all the chrysalises are empty.
And that's what's fun.
That's what this is.
And if it were turned upside down, they'd all be hanging.
When the monarchs have hatched and are healthy,
I apply to the University of Kansas to Monarch Watch,
and I buy tags.
This is what they look like on a sheet.
They are numbered and lettered
so that if and when they are ever retrieved in Mexico,
they will know where they've come from
and what kind of journey they've had to get to Mexico.
So far I haven't had one reported found.
It doesn't mean it wasn't, but it wasn't found.
The tag goes on the discal cell of the monarch butterfly.
It's shaped like a glove.
You'll see it later.
I put it on with a
toothpick, and you press it for a couple of seconds,
hold it down, let the monarch go.
It's gone.
Monarch butterflies don't like to fly
in temperatures less than 56?.
So come fall, if we've got a bad day
and we've got a monarch which needs to go,
I bring in flowers, put it in the cage,
and hope they'll get some nectar from it, and see.
However, when they don't,
I say, "Okay, I guess I got to do it myself."
So this is kind of fun.
Marianne and I learned how to do this last summer
and I'd never done it before.
This is a jar lid.
In it is a paper towel
that is saturated with a 20% sugar solution.
I just used hummingbird nectar.
Put it in there.
Put the monarch butterfly in there.
They taste with their feet.
So if this one says: Hey, this tastes good!
I'm going to put my proboscis down.
And you can see where it is: down at the very bottom.
He's eating.
This is in the juice, and he's sucking up the moisture...
the water here, fluid.
This one is doing the same thing.
He was also hungry.
Sometimes if they're not hungry
and they keep their proboscis curled up like this,
I'll take a toothpick and just push it in and push it down.
Open up the proboscis and then they start feeding.
It's kind of fun.
And when they're done, you swish their feet in clear water
because they don't want to have sugar on their feet.
I go Swoosh, swoosh!
Isn't that cool? [laughing]
Yeah, it doesn't seem to bother them either.
Okay, do you know the difference between a male and female?
Size sometimes is the difference,
but most of the time it's not.
This is a female, and this is a male.
Can you tell the difference?
[crowd mumbling]
The two spots.
The male is the only one that has the two spots.
Apparently, scientists don't know what they're for,
but they're there.
The female may have thicker veins.
She may not.
But the main way you can tell is for the spots on the male.
This little guy said: Thank you.
I'm out of here!
But first I got to say goodbye.
In order to grow monarch butterflies [chuckling]
you need to grow milkweed.
This is swamp milkweed in the front yard.
It's usually pink, this one turned white.
I'm delighted that it did.
It is a nectar plant for the monarch.
It's also a place to lay their eggs.
This is butterfly weed, which most of you know.
It comes in shades of yellow to bright orange.
It is a perennial, it comes back every year.
It's a nectar plant.
It's also where they can lay their eggs.
This is swamp milkweed again.
These are also nectar plants.
They're very, very good for...
they like to lay the eggs even on the flowers,
so I have to watch those too.
This is curassavica .
This is a tropical milkweed,
and that's what this one is here.
It doesn't grow here.
It's tropical.
So when I have it out in the yard,
I have to bring it in and overwinter it in the house.
Sometimes it does what the other ones do:
it makes itself make seeds.
So I keep those,
but they don't have to be cold stratified
the way the other ones do.
So I can just replant them and hope that it grows.
It's a tropical milkweed.
You can buy the seeds too, I believe.
I haven't had to buy any for a while
because I've kept these things going.
So the journey continues.
What do we do next?
The first thing we do is plant milkweed.
Try not to use pesticides.
It's just whatever you're going to use
can also do a number on your butterflies.
Plant some milkweed. Add nectar plants.
Anything that has nectar on it
the butterflies will thank you for
because it's their food.
Plant some milkweed.
Convert some of your lawn to butterfly habitat.
Twenty-eight million [chuckling] acres
in this country are nothing but lawns.
They don't have to be that.
Plant some milkweed.
Convert some of your lawn to habitat.
Plant some milkweed.
Create roadside habitats.
Every time you turn around,
you see the cutters going down the highway.
They're cutting down everything in sight next to the fields.
And if we were to plant native plants along there,
in the long run there would be fewer amounts of maintenance
that would have to be done to those roadside gardens.
Plant some milkweed.
Certify your yard as a Monarch Way station.
It's a very simple process:
you tell them what you have in your yard,
how many hours of sunshine you have,
how many kinds of flowers you have.
It's very easy to be certified,
and it's kind of a bragging point.
You can say, "My yard is a Monarch Way station."
And then, you can also plant milkweed.
[audience chuckling]
Do you sense a theme here? [laughter]
Well, that's sort of the end of my program,
but what I'd like to say is
with all the pessimistic numbers about monarch butterflies
and their demise,
it makes us wonder if we're ever going to get any better.
Will it help? Will we get any further?
This sentence came from the National Wildlife Federation
and I like this very much.
If we don't have them, we're losing.
I've also given you some websites to look for.
These are the four that I use the most.
Monarch Watch is the one in the University of Kansas.
What it does is give you the best program
for raising and rearing and releasing monarch butterflies.
They are very, very good, and it's also very free.
Journey North is the one that...
and it's in the fall Journey South.
It tells you what is going on.
You can go online and find out
from them where people have located
first milkweed,
first eggs, first adult butterfly.
And you can go online and look up
where people have seen these things,
and then you can also post that you've seen something.
It's kind of fun.
Monarch Joint Venture is an organization of
more than 30 groups of research, education, conservation
which are trying
to keep the pollinators alive in this country.
And the last one is a YouTube... Mr. Science [chuckling]
I just found this recently. It's delightful.
Rich Lund is a science teacher in St. Johns, Michigan.
He's done a series of five videos
from collecting seeds to catching butterflies,
to raising them, to releasing them.
He does a really good job
and he has some very nice close-ups of some of the things.
For example, one of the ones
is the caterpillar coming out of the egg
and watching him chow down on his shell.
There kind of fun sites.
And they are interesting because they're hands-on,
and he's very knowledgeable.
I have to tell you one of the things that he does.
This cracked me up.
He had a cage about like this.
He cut out a slit in the bottom
and he set it over a couple of milkweed plants.
He, like I, has spent a great deal of time
beating the bushes and going around the countryside
looking for eggs and caterpillars.
Even though I had a lot of milkweed in my yard,
I didn't have any eggs sometimes.
So he set this cage over a couple of milkweed plants.
Caught a female butterfly.
He said I think probably she's found a boyfriend.
He didn't know for sure.
He put her in the cage
and left it in there from 11 in the morning until 7 at night.
This is in one of the videos.
When he finished, he very carefully pulls,
yeah, he let the butterfly go,
he pulled the cage up,
and found some eggs on his milkweed
that had been covered with this cage.
His wife is doing the videoing and she's saying,
"Rich, this is more than you've ever had before."
Well, he got done counting eggs and [laughing]
he had 90 eggs, every one of which hatched.
[audience murmuring]
And his wife said, "What are you going to do about this?"
He said, "It's a work-in-progress." [laughter]
I want to do that this year.
If I can't find any that's a great way to do it.
But anyway that's the story of my journey.
I hope some of you will try to take on a journey too because
if we don't, we're not going to have any more butterflies.
Parenthetically...
This is my last point and I'm so excited.
I went on Journey North yesterday, looked up sightings.
At this point, as of yesterday,
adult butterflies have been sighted in Wisconsin Rapids,
New London, Black Earth,
Waunakee, and Waukesha.
Guess what, guys?
We're going to start a new journey! [laughter]
Thank you.
[applause]