Summer 2020 - The Pandemic Year
- Marilyn J Zwissler
- Oct 31, 2021
- 1 min read
Updated: Jul 26, 2022
This was the summer of the human virus pandemic: COVID-19. It was also the summer of the Monarch Butterfly pandemic of the Black Death: nuclear-polyhedrosis-virus/ (NPV).
Oh, the pitfall of thinking you know everything. I fully understand the term "Sophomore" after this year. I was a wise fool.
A single monarch came at the end of April. I began to collect eggs and baby caterpillars the first week of May. I had 24 by the end of the month. And they were doing great until…I found one caterpillar writhing on the bottom of a hatchery.
In Spasms Before Death
“It's too early for Black Death,” I thought. It usually happens later in the summer. I had been too casual about rinsing the leaves in a mild Clorox solution, and now I paid for it.
Dying in the Chrysalis Process
Finding a solution
I kept moving the caterpillars around trying to separate them and stop the spread of the virus. They died one-by-one. I euthanized them as they went into their spasms by freezing them. I burned the leaves and paper liners from their hatcheries and sterilized everything. I dipped the hatcheries in a Clorox water solution and set them in the sun to dry. The virus is killed by 6 hours of sunlight.
Of the 24 that I started with, 5 managed to emerge from their chrysalises as healthy adults.
After this bitter lesson, I went on to raise and release 65 healthy adults.
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