It's a Boy!

It finally happened. Yesterday afternoon I was strolling past the garage where I keep the cocoons and saw something orange fluttering around in one of the boxes. Yippeeeee! One of them hatched or came out or emerged... ok whatever the technical term for that is... it did it. Upon closer inspection I found that it's a boy. The Monarch butterfly is easy to tell if it's a male or female. The male has a black dot on each of it's hind wings. These are it's sent glands (where he puts his pheromone into the air for the ladys to smell).

So anyway I went to cut him a piece of an orange and when I came back a second one had errupted from it's cocoon. His wings were still all crumpled up and he was hanging from the cocoon still. When his wings were opened up all the way we found he was male too. Since we had two males we froze one and set the other free to join all the other monarch butterflies in sunny Mexico... wish I could go with him for a visit.