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.

Butterfly Research

Today we finally finished our Monarch data sheet for Project Monarch Health http://www.monarchparasites.org/.  Below are the pictures of the info we are mailing in and we can't wait to see what our research shows about our local population:

We sampled 28 butterflies since May, not bad for a pair of rookies. 

Stay tuned for our next post in which we will share the changes we have made in our garden and process to accommodate the local butterfly population.

Some of you have expressed interest in creating a butterfly garden.  Though we are not experts, Isabel and I would be more than happy to help you get your garden started.  You can also let us know if you want to be notified when butterflies are either going into or coming out of their chrysalides.  Happy nature explorations to all!

Welcome Back

Hey Everybody?

Welcome back from Summer vacation!  We were very busy this Summer with friends and family and did not have time to blog.  We did have time to take pictures that we could post once the school year started.  So, to start things off with a bang we thought we would share a photo of this Stinkhorn mushroom that popped up in our front garden.  It is a bizarre looking thing with flies,  it really makes you think you have some kind of alien thing in your yard. 

Isabel and I are too smart for that so we immediately researched it on the internet.  We discovered that they are supposed to be a sign of a healthy garden so we happily accepted it's presence and it was gone in a day along with flies.

Gardening for the butterflies has made us more aware of what is in our garden.  We took some awesome pictures this Summer so stay tuned for some more great info from Isabel's garden.

Gulf Fritillary activity

Gulf Fritillary laying eggs.

perfect shot of momma at work

Two Gulf Fritillary eggs beside each other

caterpillar in its J.

Our first Fritillary chrysalis.

Captions above are thanks to Isabel.  We had a lot of activity in the garden this weekend.  Our Purple Passion flower has done exactly what we wanted, bring us Fritillary butterflies.  I didn't think it would happen so quickly, but they are regular visitors now and our vine is loaded with caterpillars.  I had to do some population management this weekend.  I didn't enjoy it, but we only have one plant.

We love to watch the fritillary.  It is a beautiful and friendly butterfly and is not bothered by our presence.  As you can see from the pictures above, she puts on quite a show as she deposits her eggs. Look closely at the picture of the chrysalis and you will see Isa's face through the vine.

Chrysalis Defects

Well, I am sorry to report that we have our first chrysalis defect issues.  The first picture is a chrysalis that formed while we were away and there were other caterpillars in the enclosure at the time.  My thought is that there was some interference/curiosity from another caterpillar but I cannot prove that.  I did do some research on www.monarchwatch.org and one forum post showed the same kind of photo and she also had other caterpillars in the enclosure.  She said her butterflies hatched without issue so I am going to leave the first one alone.  I also researched on this website http://www.butterflyfunfacts.com and she had some great pictures of damaged chrysalides, how they hatched and noted defects found, very informative.  So, I am going to let it be and then note any defects I see.

The second one formed it's chrysalis while we were away and again there were other caterpillars in the enclosure, but this one almost looks like some other issue was to blame.  I am going to remove this one from the cage and throw it away, we don't need any bad juju. 

Disney Butterflies

Queen Butterfly

Great Southern White Butterfly

Common Buckeye Butterfly

Julia Butterfly

butterfly topiary

Hi Everybody!  We were at Epcot, Disney World today and we were lucky enough to see the HGTV International Flower and Garden Festival https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/events-tours/epcot/epcot-international-flower-and-garden-festival/ on the last day.  As part of the festival they have a butterfly tent and these are the pictures that we took.  The butterflies were beautiful and the topiaries that were created for the event were awesome.

If you like gardening and butterflies, we would recommend going to Epcot during this event.

Scarlet Milkweed Devoured

These stems used to be one of my scarlet milkweed plants.  Seeing the plants like this makes me nervous that we won't be able to feed all the caterpillars.  I hate to say it, but I think we are going to have to let mother nature take it's course since I don't have enough plants for all the babies. 

We put down more seeds in hopes that this will help accommodate the extra activity.   Isabel and I will also be planting some seeds in her friends gardens so the Monarchs can visit them too.Our activity in the garden has increased a lot since the end of April.  Every time I see a butterfly in the garden I am happy and sad all at once. 

My plants need time to recover!

Purple Passion Flower

We added this beauty to our garden this weekend.  Happy Mother's Day to me!  This plant is beautiful and it has a wonderful fragrance.

This plant should attract  Gulf Fritillary, Zebra Longwing, Crimson-patch longwing, Red-banded hairstreak, Julia butterfly, Mexican butterfly and is also a nectar plant.

We would love to have our state butterfly in the garden and the fritillary is beautiful.

Butterfly Stats

When Isabel and I first started this adventure we had a feeling that most of our butterflies were females, but we had not been keeping track.  Curious about our ratio of females to males we went back and looked at our pictures to see who was in the lead and it turns out that we were right; females are more common.  We have released a total of 14 Monarchs ( 5 males and 9 females).

We currently have 8 or 9 chrysalides waiting to hatch.  This past couple of weeks we have had more butterflies than ever, must be the season.  This picture gives you a good idea of how busy we have are.  If you look carefully you can see we have butterflies, chrysalides and caterpillars in this shot.  We have to give a shout out to Daddy who bought us this new home for the caterpillars; he likes to watch them too.  Their new home keeps them all in one place and contained until they are ready for release.  Everyone likes to walk by or sit in front of it and watch the caterpillars do their thing.

GULF FRITILLARY SPOTTED

I found this beautiful GULF FRITILLARY on my lantana plant.  I think it is a male. Just that morning I was second guessing my purchase of the plant because I had not seen any other butterflies and also because after I planted it I discovered it is considered an invasive.  It is incredibly rewarding to see that our little garden is slowly attracting other butterflies. 

The Next Generation

 How many caterpillars do you see?

It has been a while since we posted because we didn't have any butterflies to report on.  As you can see from these photos, we are about to make up for lost time.  We currently have 8 caterpillars, which is very exciting; this is the most we have ever had!

 

These are the caterpillars that we brought in today because they are about one day from making their chrysalis.  The others were left on the plant to grow a bit more.

Isabel and I have discovered the hard way that if we leave them outside they just vanish.






Isabel has lost her interest in the blog at the moment so for now you are stuck with mom.  We may be expanding our content to include some of the other insects and wildlife that we are lucky enough to see here in South Florida.

Caterpillar to Chrysalis

We are excited about this post because we are getting better at recording the steps from caterpillar to butterfly and have figured out how to share it with you.  Yesterday we released another female.  At first, we weren't sure if she was going to make it because she went into her chrysalis while she was kind of small compare to the others that we have seen.  We had two males at the same time and they were big, fat guys when they went into their chrysalis.

Below is the video of her in the fifth and final stage of shedding her skin, this is why she looks green and slimy.  They shed their skin after they have made the top part of their Chrysalis.  This little attachment holds them up while they shed and later holds their chrysalis in place, it is pretty strong. 

http://youtu.be/-AQTKuApgw8

She went into her chrysalis on February 22 and came out a butterfly on March 2.  She ended up falling from the chrysalis attachment (my fault) when the chrysalis was clear, so glad I didn't kill her.  In the first picture you can see her abdomen sticking out of the top which wouldn't happen normally. 

This blog is turning into an education on blogs, posts and videos for both Isabel and I.  Once again we have more videos to share and are having a hard time uploading.  Stay tuned...  We love to hear from you, click on Post Comment to leave an educational or encouraging message.