Ok, I'll correct myself, the pic w/ all of them, is egg, 2nd, 3rd & 4th instar, right? I know the big guy was in 4th, I watched him shed his skin shortly after the pic was taken, and he's now pupated. Some of the others are in 5th instar as of today too!

Beautiful photos Minrose. I don't remember if you've posted pics of your grow op yet, but I'd love to see some. Hope you have good weather and lots of fun at the festival - and see LOTS of Monarchs! I'm down to my last 7 cats eating. I am kinda sad to see it coming to an end too. But there will be lots of eclosures over the next couple weeks - with at least a dozen emerging today. :)

Took me a little while! That is great! Whenever I see this position on a butterfly, I know it means doom. I was finding perfect individual wings in the butterfly house this summer. All I had to do was look up and find the assailant. Apparently mom had laid eggs in the house sometime and all the wee ones grew up to a nice fat size capable of eating adult butterflies. Took us a while to find them all. Elisabeth

May I make a couple of suggestions? When you start your scanning play a little first to get the feel of what you want to achieve. Then when you start the serious scanning consider saving as bitmaps - bmp - rather than jpg and as large as you can. I try to create 2 to 4 meg scans so that I have a good sized file to work on as Iowagirl suggests. You can then always make them smaller without loss of quality if you need to at any time. Also if you re-work any of them create a copy first so the original never gets messed up and is available. Is there damage other than fading to any of the photos?