Caterpillar Nurseries

[chrysanthemum]

Our family from time to time raises caterpillars inside to release outside as butterflies.  I just started the project again with my five year old as I noticed several Black Swallowtail caterpillars on the dill in our garden.  The problem is that the dill is rapidly going to seed and drying up at this point in the summer, and the birds are pretty active in the garden right now.  I thought that bringing these guys inside would give them a better shot at surviving.  I think we have seven.




My son helped me clean and sterilize a small aquarium that we use for the project.  We then filled a plastic container with water and punched a couple of holes in a lid.  We found where the caterpillars were and simply cut that part of the plant and put it into the water through the hole.  We then provided them some fresher greens from the volunteer dill in our backyard herb planter.  

Sometimes I find it relaxing just to sit and watch a caterpillar eat.  It’s amazing how fast they can devour greenery.

[chrysanthemum]

I tried to get some pictures today of a different “caterpillar nursery” that we have.

Gulf Fritillary butterflies use various species of passionflowers as their host plants.  We have the native Texas Maypop growing as well as some ornamental vines on a large arched trellis beside our house.  I see butterflies every day out our family room window.  Sometimes I see these butterflies inside the nearby “blueberry cube” that is covered with bird netting.  The caterpillars eat and grow on our trellised vines, but then they crawl away to a different spot to pupate.  Sometimes they crawl into the blueberry cube and emerge as butterflies inside there.  When they are still newly emerged I’ve actually seen them squeeze out of the netting, but if I see one flying about I’ll go open the door and shoo them out.


I’ve never brought these caterpillars inside to raise as they seem to be doing quite well on their own outside.  They can strip vines down pretty well, but I have a lot of vines, so I’m glad to let them.

Here’s a shot of a caterpillar eating.


One of the ornamental blooms that helps attract butterflies and hummingbirds.


There were at least four butterflies flying while I was trying to get a picture, but I couldn’t focus as fast as they would flit.  I think there’s one in the corner of this shot, though.


This caterpillar was hanging in a “J” shape, a sign that it’s getting ready to form a chrysalis.

[heavyhitterokra]

I love Black swallow Tails! I'm glad to hear you're helping them along that way. We've only ever successfully kept a caterpillar over winter inside, once. Then, we missed seeing it come out of its cocoon. We came home one day and it was laying dead in a pan of oil where it had landed upside down. We had been watching it wriggle around in that cocoon for nearly 6 months, then were not home the day it decided to come out

Have you ever eaten a Maypop fruit? They're pretty good when the seeds form that gel coating around them.  (Just eat the gel seed coating, not the seeds).  They taste similar to a kiwi but tarter and tangier.

[chrysanthemum]

We have tried a couple of Maypops, but it was a while ago, and I think they weren’t quite ripe. We don’t seem to get much fruit (or maybe the squirrels eat it before I notice). I would love to grow one of the tropical passionflowers, but we’re too cold for most varieties.

We really like raising swallowtails and have had pretty good success. We usually raise Black swallowtails, but once found a cocoon of a tiger swallowtail when we were raking leaves in Virginia. It lived over winter in our house and hatched out in the the spring. We also raised some Giant swallowtails last summer. They had hatched on a satsuma mandarin that had been grazed by deer, and I really didn’t want them to strip more leaves. I brought them in and fed them from some trifoliate orange that was growing in our backyard. (I think it was suckering rootstock from a citrus tree that probably died before we moved in.)

We’ve also raised Monarchs several times since moving to Texas. We’re trying to encourage native milkweed to grow on our property for them. We often see them flying through.

The Black Swallowtail caterpillars we have now are definitely eating and growing. They seem a little smaller than I would expect, but I wonder if it’s because there were so many on a limited food source in the garden. They really stripped the plants I brought in the other day, so I cleaned their aquarium today and put in some fresh dill.   I try to disturb them as little as possible, moving their stalks rather than ever touching them.

[chrysanthemum]

I actually ran out of dill to feed my caterpillars over the weekend, but thankfully they made the transition to parsley just fine.  Several have pupated; others are in J shape getting ready to make the chrysalis.

[chrysanthemum]

All seven of the caterpillars have pupated as of a few days ago.  They chose all sorts of different spots.  The ones that chose natural materials made green chrysalides; the ones on the screen and paper towel are brown.  I removed the green ones to a netted enclosure so that I could clean the frass out of the aquarium.  I tore off the section of paper towel and hooked it to the top of the aquarium as I was concerned that it was so near the floor that an emerging butterfly might injure its wings.  I’ll be keeping watch the next couple of weeks to see what happens.

[chrysanthemum]

We had our first eclosure today.  I had noticed in the afternoon that one of the chrysalides was growing darker, but I missed the actual event.  My daughter saw the butterfly after he had fully emerged but still wasn’t ready to fly.  We carefully took the entire enclosure outside and then got a passionflower from our trellis to be his exit vehicle.  He climbed on the flower, and I lifted him out.  He sat for a while on my eight year old’s lap, and then I put the flower in the shaded ginger planter.  He rested there for a bit longer, and my five year old and I saw him make his first short flight to a Texas sage bush beside our deck.  At that point we assume that he’ll be fine.

Edited to add: My oldest proclaimed this butterfly to be named “Throckmorton.”  

[heavyhitterokra]

That's so cool!

The Maypop blossom is so beautiful that it rivals the butterfly.

[chrysanthemum]

It is a beautiful flower, but it’s one of our ornamentals rather than the true Texas Maypop.  I’ll have to look up what it is later.

I have had a very busy butterfly morning: three eclosures.  No sooner did the first get situated outside, then there was a second.  I got that one to the garden as well, and I did some watering and extra work until I verified that both had flown a bit.  Then I came inside to snap a photo of the chrysalis that was getting ready, and lo and behold, a third.  I just got it situated to dry on an eggplant bloom, but I had to come in to drink some water and cool down.  I’ll check on it in a bit, but I thought I’d post photos.

This was the first one to come out.  It climbed onto my finger to exit the cage, and my five old got to carry it to the garden.  He named it “Hibiscus Butterfly,” I thought I’d put it on an okra blossom.  It’s a female, and there is a bit of damage to one wing (perhaps from a fall when I first tried to locate it on a Crape Myrtle blossom, and it fell to the ground).  Nevertheless when it flew, it took a long tour over the whole garden and then flew so far that I didn’t even see it land.






The second to come out was a male (as yesterday’s was, I believe).  My younger daughter named him “Walnut.”  We put him on a zinnia blossom.  His first flight was very short to a nearby tomato plant where he crawled into the shade.  He was still there when I just took the third one out.








The third one was still pumping up its wings when I found it, but it crawled willingly to my hand. I carried it to the garden, and put it on an eggplant bloom since those were a little more shaded than most of the other flowers. I don’t know what the butterfly prefers, but since the other had flown to shade, I let this one rest there.








I need to run errands, but I’d like to make sure this one flies before I go.  It’s not that there’s really anything I can do if it doesn’t, but I just feel that then I’ve truly ended my job.

Edited to add: She flew when I went back out to check on her (and thus I confirmed that she was female).  My daughter named her “Augusta” because I think that sort of seemed like asparagus where she landed.

[heavyhitterokra]

The flowers on your plants are deeper purple than the wild ones that I have around here.

This is the variety that I have growing out back.

[chrysanthemum]

We have one of those native Maypops on the same trellis, and our flowers have even more white than the ones in the video.  The foliage has grown a lot this year,  but I’m not seeing too many blooms right now, unless they are more purple this year, and I’m confusing them with the others.  The trellis is one big glorious bundle of vines, and I’m looking out the window now at the butterflies enjoying them.

We had another butterfly eclose yesterday morning.  It was another male, and for some reason my daughter named him “Grape.”  He got to dry off on a lantana that grows near our shed.  I was happy when I went to check on him that he chose to fly off into our garden.  I got another picture of him on a tomato plant.

[heavyhitterokra]

Those are cool photos. It's always special to see a swallow tail.

[chrysanthemum]

I was looking out my husband’s office window today after we had huge storms last night and this morning (2 inches in about an hour last night, another 2 inches this morning though spread out over more time), and the passionflower trellis was really looking lovely.  It’s hard to capture in a picture through the window (and not get in the unattractive equipment it’s designed to shelter and hide), but I thought I’d try.

I was looking more closely at my vines the other day, and it turns out that my Maypops this year are quite purple and less white.  They are really virtually indistinguishable from the ornamental variety.  I wonder if it has to do with more rain and less heat stress.

[heavyhitterokra]

Those Maypop blossoms are so beautiful; and the fact that there are so many of them lets one feel less obtrusive when picking one to get a closer look at their intricate patterns. I love the flowers we get on ours out here. Because of that I let them take over in places where I'd normally not allow vines to exist. They are even nice in the winter because of the wheat-colored fruits in arrangements with other flowers. When You break open a dried maypop fruit, it smells like vanilla inside. It's a faint smell that doesn't last long, but it's a really welcome fragrance in the dead of winter when other things have lost their allure.

[chrysanthemum]

The last two chrysalides have not (yet) produced any butterflies.  We’ve had them overwinter before, though I wouldn’t have expected them to start overwintering in the height of summer, but I haven’t given up on them.  I did move them today, however, in order to free up the aquarium where they were.  They had attached to the screen covering, so I took that outside and clipped it up underneath our passionflower trellis so that the chrysalides can still hang in their proper position.

I washed and sterilized the aquarium with alcohol and cut another covering from a roll of screen material that we have.  Then I went outside to our backyard and gathered some trifoliate orange leaves.  Trifoliate orange is commonly used as a rootstock on citrus trees, and my guess is that the previous owners had planted some sort of citrus and then lost it to cold at some point.  Even the trifoliate orange died back this winter in our cold, but it has come up again from the roots.  It’s got rather vicious thorns on it, but I’ve kept it around because it’s small right now, and it makes good food for Giant Swallowtail butterflies.

This morning I saw three small Giant Swallowtail caterpillars on the top of one of our Meyer Lemon bushes.  Because our citrus had such a hard winter, I really don’t want it getting too defoliated at this point, so I moved the caterpillars inside to the aquarium and gave them some trifoliate orange to eat instead.  I took a couple of pictures of the three caterpillars.  They’re still quite small and not particularly attractive (I think God designed them to look like bird droppings), but the butterflies are amazing, so I hope these guys make it.







Edited to add: I just realized that I got some grainy photographs of a Giant Swallowtail the other day when my son and I went on a butterfly walk.  I’ll include them here even though they aren’t butterflies I raised.  Maybe it’s the parent of one of my little caterpillars, though.