A number of monarch butterflies are on their way to south for the winter, thanks to a woman from Steinbach.

Eastern black swallowtail chrysalis (Photo credit: Marcie Rempel) Marcie Rempel released 367 Monarchs throughout the year. She has only been raising the butterflies for three years and her granddaughters really enjoy releasing them.

“They love letting them crawl on their hands and sometimes up onto their face,” she says. “They love seeing them being released.”

And Rempel enjoys sharing this unique experience with anyone who is interested. Butterflies were released in a couple of different places this summer.

“My mom lives at Fernwood so, we released a few there. We went out to Paradise Village which is close to Ste. Anne. I thought two or three people were going to come and there ended up being 40 or 50 people to release butterflies,” she says with laughter. “So, I think everybody there really enjoyed it.”

ugh, another butterfly species has grown to enjoy her home. Rempel says there’s a good chance it was noticed in a number of gardens this year.

“You might see kind of a green and black caterpillar in your carrot tops, your dill, your parsley, and that’s the eastern black swallowtail,” she says.

The caterpillars will eat a lot before forming a chrysalis and then transforming into butterflies. If the chrysalis is formed late in summer, the chrysalis will winter-through outside on the house or on a fence and emerge as a butterfly in April or May.

“They’re not lucky like the monarchs, they don’t get to fly south,” Rempel says, jokingly.