Our milkweed plants paid several benefits including drawing monarch butterflies to them. I was fortunate to witness a female butterfly laying eggs on the pods. That caused me to study more of the life cycle and I knew approximately when the eggs would hatch. Of course there were many trips each day to check progress. Here I caught a first stage larva about 20 minutes after it first emerged from it's egg. The first thing it did was rest a bit before consuming the eggshell. No protein is wasted.