Do Cats Like Milkweed

One monarch caterpillar can eat an entire milkweed plant in the 10-14 days before it turns into a chrysalis.

Do cats like milkweed. CATS CAN BE RAISED ON A COMBINATION OF MILKWEED AND SQUASH FROM EARLY INSTARS if you baby them I checked on them every couple of hours during the day but they are more susceptible to disease than cats raised on all milkweed. Photo by Monika Maeckle. Some mimic human speech.

Im happy to hear that the monarch caterpillars are feeding on your milkweed. If Milkweed is a host they may be competing for Milkweed leaves with the Monarch caterpillars. If you were a deer grazing in a salad bowl of vegetation you might bite off a Milkweed occasionally but if you got a mouthful of white sticky latex on your tongue every time you would definitely prefer to eat something else.

So dear Patti plant the milkweed and watch to see what the deer do. Monarch caterpillars do only eat plants in the Milkweed family Asclepias spp so if we want to help them out in our wildlife gardens we still need to add these plants to our gardens. A female monarch can lay 300-500 eggs over the span of two-five weeks.

Pinch the very tip of a leaf and carefully turn it over without shaking the plant. The best thing to do is to plant MORE milkweed because this is the only host plant they feed on. A monarch chrysalis hangs from the leaf of common milkweed Asclepias syriacaThis is the stage in the life cycle where the caterpillar changes to a butterfly.

Milkweed Asclepias spp is a group of common herbaceous ornamentals that are an essential food source for caterpillars of the monarch butterfly Danaus plexippus. There are many types of milkweed and I happen to have two of them in my yard. According to an ARS and Iowa State University study of nine milkweed species native to Iowa female monarch butterflies laid eggs in all nine milkweeds but the swamp and common milkweed averaged the highest number of eggs.

Silky Gold tropical milkweed is healthier than scarlet in this area. They are unlikely to cause direct harm to your Monarch eggs or caterpillars since they most likely eat plant material not other insects. Last week I noticed this fellow noshing on a pot of Swamp milkweed Asclepias incarnata.