🌿🐛 How COLD Temps Affect Metamorphosis❓🐢

Cold Cat Care + Shop Still Open through...

September 06, 2025

Good Weekend Royal Raiser,

we’re just coming out of a cold spell here where we’ve had lows in the 40’s and highs only reaching 50 to 60 degrees .

Today is the final day of this cool stretch as we move back into a summery reprieve of sun and 70’s.

There are (at least) a few monarchs still hanging out in our yard and they’ve still come out briefly to stock up on nectar in this cool weather. I’m sure some have already migrated south, and more could be fluttering through in the coming days.

We have had to make some changes to our raising set up to accommodate this cool weather. More details on what we’ve done below…

As I’ve mentioned before, we are shutting down our raising supplies shop. I still haven’t finished moving over all the necessary content back to the blog, so the shop is still open and the following supplies can still be shipped until we shut it down. I don’t have an exact date, but it will be in September. More details below…

September SHOP Farewell 👋

This is the final month to buy raising supplies from our shop. As you might have noticed, most of the supplies are sold out but you can still buy these supplies while the shop is still up ands running. We pay shipping on all shop orders $50+

  1. Little hole lids ⬅️ only buy these IF you already own our ‘fat cat’ floral tubes, which are already sold out. These alternative lids are for thin-stemmed cuttings to prevent baby caterpillar drownings

  2. Garden for Life Pollinator Garden Flags ⬅️ (20% OFF and a good gift idea for the upcoming holidays!)

  3. Raising Butterfly and Milkweed Quickstart Guides ⬅️ (instant PDF downloads: save an extra 15% when you bundle with lids or flag)

Thank you for all your support over the past decade. 😍 Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on supporting monarchs and other beneficial pollinators and will still publish a newsletter and the monarch butterfly garden blog to help you achieve these goals.

In fact, during this first weekend of September, I’m still raising 14 monarchs to release for the great fall migration and will be sharing our 2025 raising experience with you (in this newsletter) sometime toward the end of September.

I know many of you are still raising your migration generation butterflies, or perhaps, just about to start?

If you've gone through the all raise the migration info, and released your final butterflies for 2025, please check out the following info...

COLD Raising Report 🥶

We currently still have 11 caterpillars, 1 J caterpillar, and 2 chrysalides.

We were raising half of the monarchs outdoors and half inside my office. The office monarchs are being raised indoors with the window open (during the day) to expose them to natural heat, light, and humidity so they know it’s time to migrate when they’re released.

With this cold stretch of weather, the outdoor caterpillars have been moved inside until Sunday or Monday.

Thursday morning, I checked the outdoor monarchs and found the first J caterpillar contorted (almost looked like it had parasites) and another looked frozen in place on a milkweed leaf. I brought them inside. Within 10 minutes the j caterpillar transformed back to regular j shape and, within half an hour, the frozen caterpillar had resumed munching its milkweed meal. 🌿🐛

In J formation now

If we still had a 3-season porch, we could have just closed the windows, but to prevent the life cycle slow-down cold weather brings, we might have still opted to bring them indoors…

As of Sunday, both groups will again be exposed to the outdoor elements so they know it’s time to fatten up before they migrate…

More lessons to come when we share our 2025 raising experience…

Raise The Migration 2025- Share Your Experience! ✍️

This is an opportunity to post what you've learned this season, what raising challenges you faced, and anything new you'll be doing to improve your raising process in 2026.

You can fill out the comment box at the bottom of the linked page below.

Please do not post questions in the comment box as blog comments are not a good platform for ongoing discussions. This is specifically to share your 2025 raising experience including any helpful tips you think will benefit others in the community. Thanks in advance for sharing! 😊

You can share your experience here:


Remember, if you've missed any of the posts on raising monarchs through the butterfly life cycle you can catch up here:

Coming Soon?

In the next few weeks I will be adding my lessons learned to the Share Your Experience post and also getting back to the garden with helpful info on our favorite planting season for perennial milkweed...FALL! 🍂

Until then,

Happy Raising 🌿🐛🦋🙌

Tony G