Yesterday at 1:00pm, we were invited to join Mrs. Hoskins and her class in the Library to see the Monarch Butterflies - there was a tomato cage with Monarch caterpillars and chrysalids for the past few weeks. Some of use were lucky enough to get to hold the butterflies. A lady who was an expert at working with Monarch Butterflies showed us how to test them to see if they are healthy. The expert taught us that there was a disease spreading among the butterflies. She showed us how you can put a sticker on a butterfly's wings to see if it makes it to Mexico from where you are. There were three butterflies, and one that had not hatched out of its chrysalis yet. Two of the butterflies were males, and one of them was a female. The males have dots on their wings, and the females do not. The butterflies have six legs, but you can only see four because they use the hidden legs only to pat on plants to see if they are milkweed. The expert told us that the Monarch butterflies are going extent because farmers and other people are killing the milkweed plants, which they need to eat and to lay their eggs on. When the females lay their eggs here, they die one to two weeks later, but when they lay the eggs in California, Texas, or Mexico, they can live up to nine months. We went outside and people got sugar water on their hands to try and keep the butterflies on their hands, but the butterflies flew away when we set them free - FREEDOM! At first the butterflies looked like they were flying the wrong way, but then they started going the other way, and are now going to Mexico (cha-cha-cha!). We will all miss the butterflies. After, we went outside to write about the butterflies, and what happened.
