Because it is butterfly season here at our house, I am dedicating some of this week's blogs to the life cycle of the black swallowtail butterfly.
The attached image is another instar picture. Once we brought the parsley plant indoors and placed it into the terrarium, the caterpillars continued eating. And eating. And eating.
We made several trips to the grocery store to pick up more parsley, because they had eaten the original host plant down to about nothing, so we would add more fresh parsley daily, and the caterpillars would completely devour the leaves within the day.
Because we had such luck with our butterflies last year (and the first batch even emerged as late as last spring from the previous summer) we decided to plant more parsley and see if we might be able to do it again. Sure enough, during the third week of July, a huge black swallowtail circled our back deck one afternoon, and deposited a bunch of eggs. Before we knew it, we had seventeen caterpillars chowing down on our host parsley plant. When we noticed that they were starting to crawl out of the pot, we moved to pot to the terrarium again, and made sure that we had plenty of parsley in the refrigerator.
The attached image is from a macro series that I did last year when we raised our first set of caterpillars. After having released four brand new butterflies this weekend, it's fun to look back to see what they were just a few short weeks ago.
Tomorrow - about the pupa-chrysalis stage.
No comments:
Post a Comment