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A monarch butterfly settles on the leaf of
milkweed plant.

A monarch butterfly settles on the
leaf of milkweed plant.

She gently presses a tiny egg on to one
of its leaves.
The egg is the beginning of another....

It's summertime in the north. A breeze
stirs the stem of the milkweed plant. The
monarch egg is white and shiny.
It is the size of a small dot and sticks to
the leaf.

When the butterfly lays the egg, she makes
it sticky.
Wind and rain cannot make the egg come
loose.

In a few days the egg hatches. Out crawls
a small caterpillar, also called a larva.
First the caterpillar eats the eggshell and
then chews away at the milkweed leaf.
The egg of a monarch is almost always
laid on a milkweed plant. The plant will
be its food.

The caterpillar eats and grows and begins
to change.
It breaks out of its old skin, showing a new
skin underneath. This is
called molting.

For two weeks the caterpillar eats and eats.
It molts a bout five times. Finally, it is a full
grown monarch caterpillar, a bout two inches
long.

Now something wonderful begins to happen.
The caterpillar creeps to the stem of a leaf.
It attaches itself to the steam and drops
down head first. The caterpillar's bright
colors become greenish.

Then the skin splits and moves up to the top.
The skin falls off. A new, strange form appears!
It is called the chrysalis or pupa. The chrysalis
is like a blanket that is wrapped around the
body growing inside.

At first, the chrysalis is long and soft. Then
it shrinks and hardens, and becomes light
green decorated with gold dots. Inside monarch
butterfly begins to grow.

About two weeks later, the chrysalis changes
again. It turns gray green before becoming
transparent. Inside are white dots, and orange
and black lines.

The chrysalis wiggles. Then it splits open. The
butterfly begins to pull itself out. The head and
legs appear first, and then the rest of it slides
out.

The wings are tiny and stuck together, and
the butterfly's abdomen is big. The abdomen
becomes smaller when its fluid is pumped
into the wings. The wings become bigger. A
Caterpillar has turned into butterfly. This
called metamorphosis.

The butterfly sits quietly for a few hours, waiting
for its wings to dry and harden. At last they begin
to move slowly, and then beat faster and faster.

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