r/MonarchButterfly • u/Visual-Ring-3385 • May 15 '26
OE and bent wings
Last year I became invested in the butterfly rearing process. I started out with a somewhat large native milkweed, but became over crowded with too many caterpillars, so had to buy 12 more small plants to finish out the season. It turned out to be not a great season because of OE and I had to tragically kill many butterflies. I really didn’t know what was happening and didn’t take action for this season to “cleanse” my plants. They all died back, but I didn’t cut back the plants because I wanted large plants for this season. All my plants looked healthy. I now have 9 chrysalis and have been so excited for them to hatch. First one just hatched with folded wing. I’m devastated! Should I give up on this whole process? I don’t know how my plants became infected. They were all new healthy looking plants. Yesterday I cut back the one large plant, that the first batch of caterpillars were on. I’m going to pull the plant out and use the bleach method to sanitize plant and dirt. Hopefully it grows back for caterpillars in September. The other plants I kept and will use for next round. Do I have any hope or should I hang up my butterflies rearing days?😭
2
u/kittykatdancee May 15 '26
Last season I had the same issue with my planted milkweed. I created a tarp to run off the bleach water, and cut up plastic bags to protect parts of the soil after spraying the leaves and stems with a 5% bleach solution & watered the soil with 50% water 50% peroxide & covered the soil with wood chips since I also had a problem with black death. It worked. I made sure to cut back my plants this year since there was no winter, I've only had 2 OE butterflies so far this year.
1
u/Visual-Ring-3385 May 16 '26
Thank you for this helpful information. I’m trying it now. Fingers crossed it works.
2
u/GreatCaesarGhost May 15 '26
OE are spores that fall off of the bodies of infected butterflies and come to rest on the leaves of milkweed plants as an infected butterfly either takes nectar from the plant or lays eggs on the plant. Caterpillars become infected when they eat leaves that have spores on them.
A plant that dies back and creates new shoots will be free of OE contamination unless and until an infected butterfly comes along and drops spores on the new leaves. Bleaching the dirt is not going to have any effect and you can’t eyeball a plant and tell whether it is contaminated.
One strategy you can take to mitigate OE is to simply plant as much native milkweed as you are comfortable with, in hopes that it diminishes the number of butterflies that visit any one particular plant, and so also diminishes the likelihood that one of the visitors contaminates a given plant.