The weather finally came through to break the short heat wave we ‘d had. Rains most of the day, and I could not get the timing right to look for eggs between them.
This morning I wound up moving the larger instars out of the incubator because it was getting a bit chaotic in there. I took out the mason jar leaf keepers because they were right on that edge where they might wander between stalk and screen hole into the water, and instead cleaned everything on the base and put down a fresh towel. I then brought the leaves they were on to that keeper, as the chrysalis has nothing to fear from them.
The number of hatched eggs surpassed those that had the tell tale black tip last night, and more are not far behind. I even was lucky to catch one crawling out of its egg and doing its very slow turn around to go back and eat said egg.
I have been moving the still mostly white eggs to the same leaf, and those that were starting to darken went to two others.
I debated getting a fresh young leaf for the newer instars, but at their size it’s highly unlikely they’ll eat all the way through the leaf they’re working on. So I misted the incubator well, and made sure none of the towel wraps on the leaf vein ends were dry.
Even with a magnifying glass, I’m having a really hard time telling which black tipped eggs are actually eggs and which are possibly first instar that haven’t completely eaten their egg yet or may still be at rest from hatching. Their teeny bodies are hard to differentiate from the egg color wise. So this count might not be accurate. More eggs hatched either during the day or overnight last year where it was clearer due to distance of first from any egg spot whether they’d hatched or not.
Maybe I need a better magnifying glass.
Current Count:
- 1 chrysalis
- 4 third instar
- 1 second instar
- 6 first instar
- 15 eggs
