I’ve been monarch ranching for awhile, but I’ve always wanted to ranch some swallowtails. Some species of swallowtail caterpillars feed on parsley. Earlier this spring, I found out that we had accidentally had a black swallowtail living in our apartment (we guess it came in as a caterpillar on some of Cinnamon’s parsley) but I wanted to it right this summer, and find the caterpillar and watch it grow. Mr. Neil has some parsley (above) in his garden, so I decided to see if I could find swallowtail caterpillars on that. I find that locating caterpillars takes a long time the first time you look for them, but once you find them, your eyes become trained and in the future, they are easier to find. I sat down and studied the parsley.
After a good ten minutes of study, I found six small caterpillars. They looked nothing like any of the swallowtail caterpillars in my books. I looked up the general characteristics of the black swallowtail: caterpillars are found on parsley (check), on the top side of the leaf (check), and early stages resembles bird poop (check). But still, if you look at what a large black swallowtail looks like, the books show you this. This tiny thing doesn’t look like that at all. Fortunately, with the magic of google, you can narrow your search of images on the internet and I found photos of young black swallowtail caterpillars and they look just like what I found in the above photo–success, we have swallowtails!
I took four of the six swallowtail caterpillars and put them in my butterfly pavilion. You can see a water bottle inside, holding a bunch of curly parsley for them to feed off of, right along side a water bottle full of milkweed and monarch caterpillars. Next to the pavillion is a bunch of milk weed in a different water bottle–those are plants with monarch eggs on them. I keep the eggs separate until the caterpillars hatch so I don’t confuse leaves with eggs with the leaves for feeding. Should be an interesting couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, we’ve had an early sampling of our dangerous honey from the Olga hive. Mr. Neil told us to mix some of our honey and comb with some plain Greek yogurt. YUM!
It’s like a decadent dessert, only it’s yogurt…and honey… from our own bees–that’s got to be healthy, right?
Congrats on finding the BS cats! I rasied both species that you are last summer and it does take quite abit of work. The final product is certainly worth the effort. Thanks for helping the butterflies! RANCH ON!
Ron
I never saw a swallowtail caterpillar before and they are just as beautiful (or maybe more so) as the Monarch caterpillars. Parsley, huh? Well, I’m going to have to look into this because I’m having such a ball with the Monarchs, I’d love to try another type, too. Your desert looks delicious! My mouth is watering.
I’m “ranching” a couple of Monarch caterpillars right now. (At this point I have one chrysalis and a caterpillar about to attach to the little white silk button it just made.) There was one thing I didn’t read about anywhere and had to learn the hard way: I put a tiny new cat in with one that was significantly older (five or six days?), and the big one rushed over and ATE the baby. Eek. The guilt, the horror, the morbid fascination …
I’m envious of your lovely pavilion. I keep saying I’m not doing this again, but maybe next year, if I had a nice pavilion like that …
(Huh, I just discovered that the word “pavilion” comes from the Latin “papilio” — which means butterfly!)
Good luck with the ranching!
I’ve been entertaining (?) the readers of my blog with Pillar Place — the raising of Black Swallowtail caterpillars lately. We even released our first butterfly yesterday.
They also eat dill, rue, carrots, queen anne’s lace and fennel. But, they only eat what they’re laid on, which has made it interesting for me: I have two on dill, one on rue and one on parsley!
Thanks for sharing!
I’ve been following this blog keeping up with the bees. As a bonus I got to learn about caterpillars and just now checking my parsley before washing it I found bird poop! ok, thanks to my new education I looked closer and sure enough it was a tiny caterpillar. I wondered after watching a swallowtail in the area if it was laying. LOL now I know. Thanks Birdchick!
Right now we have 21 swallowtail caterpillars and 10 in chrysalis. We have raised swallowtails, monarchs and painted ladies. My daughter loves this! Swallowtails seem to be the easiest so far.