In honor of the four butterflies we released this weekend, I wanted to do several blogs regarding the life cycle of the black swallowtail butterfly...so here we go...
Last summer, oh, about the last couple of days in July, we noticed that in our herb garden we had visitors to our parsley plant. Really HUNGRY visitors! They came to us in the form of little green caterpillars. We really didn't think too much about them, but the following Saturday morning, after a particularly heavy rain storm, these little caterpillars were still greedily consuming my parsley plant. We also noticed that there appeared to be eggs embedded within the leaves of our parsley.
Being the Google addict that I am, I went into the house, jumped on to the computer and started looking up caterpillars. After about thirty minutes of research, I found a picture of a caterpillar that looked like the ones we had on the leaves of our plant. It appeared that these little guys were going to become, sometime in the future, black swallowtail butterflies. Once this was established (I Googled the heck out of "black swallowtail caterpillars" and learned more than I ever expected to), Johnny and I went to the local pet supply store and purchased a ten gallon aquarium/terrarium and a screened lid.
We got our purchases home, and placed the pot with the parsley into the terrarium, and covered it with the screen. Of course, I grabbed my camera and shot a bunch of pictures. I wanted to document everything! Some of what I captured you will find in this blog, as well as the blogs in the coming days.
What you see today is an egg and an instar at its earlier stage. Caterpillars go through various instar stages, and I will share those with you in the coming days.
In the meantime, I encourage you to do a little Googling about black swallowtail butterflies and their life cycles. Who knows? Maybe you will be raising some yourself next year!
Until next time....
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