To Pupate or Not?

Lil Guy on Mint

Gizmos

Inside guy

Well out of my 8 cats (caterpillars) that I raised from egglings, I have 6 that I managed to keep track of. I brought 5 inside and thought I lost the last little guy but lo and behold, he was soooo ready to grow up, he moved from my parsley to my mint plant! I found a link online that had these homemade gadgets called "gizmos" and I have placed 2 in those, I have 2 inside my habitat, one in a paperbag and one outside. Let the games begin!

Caterpillar Craziness

Chunk and Squirts new house ( Chunk is named in honor of the Goonies) :-)

Osmeterium out-"peeew"

I never realized how fast caterpillars grew! I had 8 babies living on one parsley plant so I had to relocate 2 of them to the other parsley plant. I bought a reptile carrier today and am going to attempt to see two of these babies all the way from eggs to butterfly. DH thinks I am weird but I have never seen this beautiful mutation happen. I bought organic parsley form the store and stuck it into the dirt so it looks like it's growing.

The Babies

I took these yesterday and there were three caterpillars happily munching away on the Parsley-good thing because we never seem to eat it. Today there were 6 of them on the plant! I am not sure what they will do when they are all as big as my fingers-they won't have enough plant left-I may be buying Parsley in the produce department to keep up with the digestive happiness of my newest pets.

The eggs

I have been following a Black Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillar for a while and one day she disappeared. I have never seen a chrysalis so I have been trying to locate one around the yard. Anyway, while I was eating lunch I saw the butterfly through the window, it was dancing around my Parsley plant. They love Parsley! It's one of their host plants. After it flew away, I went out for an inspections and lo and behold-we had eggs!!! They are the tiniest things-some were pearly white a couple were yellow. They are supposed to hatch in 3-5 days so I went out yesterday and we have baby caterpillars! They are sooo tiny-they look like brown cigars right now. I will keep updating as they grow. Enjoy the photos.