Let’s Go Easter Egg Hunting—For Monarch Eggs!

Monarch butterfly egg on milkweed leaf. Photo credit: Lorie Shaull

By Phyllis Stiles, Founder and Director Emerita of Bee City USA

Time to gather the kids and hunt for Easter eggs—monarch butterfly eggs, that is! This weekend, our endangered native monarch butterflies will begin arriving back in Western North Carolina from their overwintering sites in southern Mexico.

If you want to hunt for monarch eggs on Easter (or anytime), plant milkweed that has been here since before colonization! Asheville GreenWorks’ Bee City USA plant list includes five species of milkweed for almost any situation: sun or part sun. Visit GreenWorks’ website to download the full plant list or access the mobile plant lists for perennials, shrubs, trees, bunch grasses and vines. Poke milkweed will even grow in the shade. However, only plant common milkweed where you want it to spread because it will! The list also includes local suppliers who are very mindful of pollinators in their pest management practices, not spraying milkweed with insecticides that will actually kill the caterpillars that emerge on them. 

Dying hens’ eggs in gorgeous colors is a longstanding Easter tradition. We do not recommend dying monarch eggs! They are only about the size of a pin head and have a pearly white color.  With magnification, you can see their longitudinal ridges.  Monarch mothers don’t sit on their eggs until they hatch into caterpillars about four days later, but they do carefully select the right host plant—some species of milkweed. They usually lay one egg per plant, hidden on the underside of a leaf. They even have their own glue” to secure their eggs to the plant. If a mother can’t find enough milkweed over about two to five weeks, she may deposit multiple eggs on a single plant, and she may lay eggs anywhere on a plant. You can read all about these eggs at Monarch Joint Venture.

Monarchs make the arduous journey from as far away as Canada to arrive in Mexico around October or November.  Being romantics, they generally mate around Valentine’s Day in Mexico. Their winter rest in the oyamel fir forests above 10,000 feet lasts until early March. Then they began their northward journey, once again flying a thousand miles or more. These old ladies are tired and anxious to deposit their eggs on tender young milkweed shoots. This is how they pass the baton to their offspring and sustain their species. Monarchs are known to lay at least 300 eggs, however, only about one percent of their offspring will grow to adulthood and reproduce. Those descendants will follow the emerging milkweed plants northward to Canada, only living weeks as adults, rather than as much as nine months, as the monarchs that traveled southward to Mexico the previous year did.  

Their overwintering numbers are precipitously low this year, validating the decision of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to add the migrating monarch species to their Red List of Threatened Species last year. Every milkweed help we plant will help to reverse their declines and sustain their magnificent up to 3,000-mile migration.