Codependent to Caterpillars, Part II

Butterfly Garden

We love our front-yard butterfly garden, especially when we see several Monarch butterflies at once enjoying the flowers and bushes we've put there to attract them.

In fact, we've had lots of Monarchs this summer flying around and landing on the Asclepia, the lavenders and the Buddleia.

What we haven't had is what makes butterflies:  namely, caterpillars.  The Asclepia plants were flourishing, but with all those Monarchs fluttering around, they should have been all but stripped of leaves.  But they weren't.

After the disaster of the Anise Swallowtail caterpillars we found on the parsley in the back yard, probably gobbled up by the Scrub Jays that hang around our bird feeder, we relocated some several Monarch caterpillars from an Asclepia plant in the back yard.  When they, too, disappeared, we began to think that maybe it wasn't just the Scrub Jays eating our caterpillars.

Wasps, lizards, ants and other predators eat caterpillars and we now suspect that the Mud Dauber Wasps that have built nests all over the eaves of our house may be responsible for the disappearance of the Monarch caterpillars.  (Caution:  that article is fairly graphic--don't read it if you're squeamish--it's like something out of "Alien").

The good news about these wasps is that they prefer to use spiders, especially Black Widows, to feed their larvae; the bad news is that they will also use butterfly caterpillars.  That's O.K. with us if the caterpillars are the larvae of the Tomato Hornworm, laid by the Sphinx Moth, but not O.K. if it's our Monarch caterpillars.

So, to protect at least some of the Monarch caterpillars, we finally bought a butterfly cage, a soft-sided mesh cage to protect them.  The cage has a clear plastic side and three mesh sides, one of which has a zipper to form a door on that side so you can open the cage.

Last Tuesday we put two fairly large Monarch caterpillars into it with some of the Asclepia in a bud vase with water.  Cindy wound plastic wrap around the stems of the plants so the caterpillars wouldn't crawl in and drown, which was probably a good precaution:  I don't think they can swim.  Then the next day we found two more caterpillars and moved them in, using a rose bud vial with a rubber lid.  We put stones in the bottom to keep the whole thing from blowing over in the wind.

By Friday the first caterpillar had crawled off the plants and attached to the cage to form a chrysalis.  Naturally, since nothing is ever easy, Numero Uno decided to attach and form his chrysalis very close to the zipper, which made it very difficult to open the cage to put fresh plants for caterpillars Two and Three.  Number four was very small and we never found out what happened to him, but Two and Three were eating everything in sight, so we had to slide the fresh plants in very carefully.

So that's the story so far.  Today Number Two is crawling all over the cage, looking for a suitable place to attach (NOT near the zipper, PLEASE!), and Number Three is still eating everything is sight and will probably attach soon, too.