Season of the Queen Butterfly

Queen butterflies are not that common in our garden so imagine our delight when we found 6 caterpillars to save.  Panic followed our delight as we thought about what we would feed them.  In the end, milkweed and purple crown from the park solved our problem.  We have very few Monarch caterpillars right now, I guess that opened up the space for the Queen. 

 

Queens are from the Monarch family and to the untrained eye can look like just another Monarch. The caterpillars are very different, they have 3 sets of antennae and in addition to black and yellow they have some red too.  The adults only have black veins on one side of their wings.  Notice from the picture that the abdomen is the same color as the wings not black like the Monarch. We also discovered that their chrysalis often turns a light shade of pink after the first few days.  Of the 6 we had only one chrysalis stayed green, but they all turned into beautiful butterflies. Below are some pic of the cats and a couple of the releases.  

Our garden is truly a butterfly garden now and butterfly sightings always make us happy.  You can see from the pics Isabel also enjoys them though she still shows no interest in writing the blog posts.

Zebra Longwings

 Good Morning!  Opened my front door this morning and found this guy.  My first thought was that he had just eclosed (come out of chrysalis), but then I couldn't figure out why the chrysalis still looked occupied.   Oh well, I went inside and forgot about it.  Then...













 I went outside again and the one butterfly turned into 2.  Then it made sense.  The longwings are like Fritillaries, they mate as soon as they eclose.  Turns out the first butterfly I saw was a male waiting to mate.  Did some research and found out this is called Pupal Mating. Cool right?    Here they are together.  Then...

I looked again and noticed two more butterflies, which means another chrysalis eclosed and a male came to mate.  Longwings love the passion vine.  We now have three plants and that has really increased the butterfly population in our yard.

Butterfly Palooza!!!

We have been watching Fritillaries and Longwings fly all over the garden for the past month, but could never find any in chrysalis.  I moved one of our plants just in case lizards were eating our cats and soon after that we noticed all of these ...  We have about six chrysalides on the plant and you can see in the pictures that one fritillary cat is in a J.  Click on the bottom picture to see all chrysalides, we marked them with a C.

Most of the chrysalides are longwings which is a change from last year when they were  mostly fritillary.  We can't wait to see the longwings emerge since we have never seen it.

In addition to these, we have a few chrysalides in our glass aquarium and one monarch that just hatched today. Check out our next post for some more cool info.

2014 Butterfly Season

It's Summer time and we are back in the garden!  We've added plants, moved plants and pulled weeds to get the butterfly garden ready.

The Fritillaries devoured our Passiflora plant last year so we had to give it to a friend so it could recover in her screened patio. So, too kick start the season I brought the plant back and added two more to our garden.  The plant immediately increased the numbers of both Fritillaries and Longwings.  It's so awesome to see the butterflies flying around the garden.  On most days we can see Monarchs, Fritillaries, and Longwings.  Queens are less common, but they do come to our garden.



Fritillaries appear to have SUPER senses; they find the plant as soon as I put it out and cover it with eggs.

This is a picture of one of the three monarch caterpillars we've raised this season.  Stay tuned for our next post when we share some new discoveries in our garden.