Butterfly Larvae are Here!

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
April 27th, 2009
Filed in Seasonal Garden Maintenance
Tags: butterflies, butterfly garden

A few weeks ago, I captured pictures of the first Eastern Black Swallowtail in our garden.  She was busily laying eggs all over our fennel plants.  I have since been inspecting the plants each day to see if the eggs had hatched.  Last week, I thought they had.  However, the little green wormy looking thing did not match the Swallowtail larva I have seen before.  So, who knows what that was. I’m sure my plants will let me know if they are being eaten by something unknown.

Garden at Night

Well, I’ve procrastinated writing additional blogs this week.  Plus, I’ve been busy celebrating getting old.  So,

tonight, I took the camera outside and started hunting for butterfly larvae in the dark, with the aid of my camera flash.  All I can say is, those poor little boogers must have been saying (in their very best southern accents) “What the HAIL is going on?” as I snapped away, in macro mode, with the flash, in the pitch dark.  My neighbors already think I’m strange because I have squash growing in old tires on one side of the house.  Unfortunately, they were disembarking for somewhere while I was squatting in the garden, tormenting the caterpillars.  In addition to some great larvae pictures, I took some beauties of my plants in the dark.

Butterfly Babies

I’ll be closely monitoring the butterfly larvae as they grow.  Last year, I got a great shot of a butterfly chrysalis attached to the ornamental grass plants in our yard, and then-miracle of miracles-a picture of the butterfly emerging from the

chrysalis.  Luckily, my husband likes to keep an eye on the larvae as much as I do.  He even named a particularly huge one last year.  Between the two of us, hopefully we’ll catch all of the life cycle stages.