- Melissa Sprenne
- Monday, August 29, 2022
Butterflies are not just beautiful to look at - they are also pollinators and an important food source for birds. And if we want to see more butterflies and birds in the world, we need to be willing to feed the caterpillars.
Richland Library Ballentine has a three-level garden bed. This season (spring and summer 2022), we decided to create a Caterpillar Garden. You can do the same in your own backyard!
Creating a Caterpillar Garden is a great way to learn about the life cycle of butterflies up close. It's also one way to help make sure that these beautiful creatures, as well as the birds, lizards, and mammals that eat them, are around for future generations to enjoy.
Older Black Swallowtail caterpillars: they have black, white, and yellow stripes with yellow spots
There are many ways to go about creating a Caterpillar Garden. You can use containers, a flower bed, a raised garden bed, or you can even plant a tree. You also need to do some research. Most butterflies are pretty specific about what plants they'll lay their eggs on. The most famous example is the Monarch butterfly. They only lay their eggs on milkweed because their caterpillars only eat milkweed, although the adult Monarchs will nectar on many flower varieties. You'll need to know what butterflies and moths live in your area and what their caterpillars like to eat. Here's a short list of examples from the National Wildlife Federation website.
Here at the Ballentine Library, we decided to turn our raised garden beds into a haven for Black Swallowtail butterflies.
Adult male Black Swallowtail butterfly
DID YOU KNOW? MALE BLACK SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLIES HAVE MORE YELLOW MARKINGS THAN THE FEMALE. FEMALE BLACK SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLIES HAVE MORE BLUE MARKINGS.
They are one of the easiest caterpillars to grow for, since they'll eat nearly anything in the carrot family of herbs. This includes the herbs fennel, dill, and parsley, as well as wildflowers like Queen Anne's Lace, Golden Alexander, and Mock Bishopweed. Because they'll eat herbs that we humans also like to eat, these caterpillars are sometimes considered a nuisance. The solution is to plant enough for everybody!
The entire bed was seeded with clover to keep down weeds - and had the added benefit of being a fantastic habitat for anole lizards and several species of small toads and frogs. You can see how well the clover grew in the first photo of this post.
In the left side, we planted Bronze Fennel.
In the middle section, we planted varieties of parsley (yellow: curly parsley; blue: flat parsley; red: fine curled parsley).
In the right side, we planted varieties of dill (yellow: dill; blue: bouquet dill; red: fernleaf dill).
If you're curious, the fennel grew really well, as did the regular dill, curly parsley, and flat parsley. The other varieties did not fare so well in our SC heat.
Our purpose was twofold: (1) Feed baby birds and (2) help raise the next generation of Black Swallowtail butterflies. To that end, we decided that the first round of caterpillars in the spring would be strictly available to the birds. It took the butterflies a couple of weeks to discover our plants, but we were ecstatic to see the first eggs on our herbs. We let them hatch and grow and disappear, presumably into the stomachs of birds and other predators. We were happy to know that we were helping birds feed their young.
Black Swallowtail eggs - tiny green dots that are about 1mm to 2mm in size
Very young Black Swallowtail caterpiller: they look a bit like bird poop!
DID YOU KNOW? IT TAKES BETWEEN 6,000 AND 9,000 CATERPILLARS TO RAISE A SINGLE BROOD OF 6-8 BABY CHICKADEES?
Towards the end of the summer, we decided it was time to protect the caterpillars and allow them to form chrysalises and become butterflies. We bought two mesh laundry baskets and once several of the caterpillars were large enough, we placed the mesh baskets over the entire plant they were on and weighed down the edges with rocks. The caterpillars created their chrysalises and we've released several butterflies so far. I hope you get lucky enough to be visiting Ballentine when this happens! It's so satisfying to see them fly off to begin their adult lives.
Black Swallowtail chrysalis
The butterflies hatch out [eclose] from their chrysalis after 2 or 3 weeks - unless they are formed late in the summer, in which case they may not eclose until the next spring!
DID YOU KNOW? ONLY MOTHS MAKE COCOONS. A BUTTERFLY CATERPILLAR CREATES A CHRYSALIS, WHICH IS JUST THE INSECT FORMING A HARD SHELL FROM ITS SKIN. MOTHS BUILD SILK OR PLANT MATTER COCOONS AROUND THEMSELVES.
Resources
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How to Raise Eastern Black Swallowtail Butterflies by Monarch Butterfly Life
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University of Florida Featured Creatures
You can get seeds for several of the herbs mentioned in this post from our Library of Things online, as well as from the Seed Libraries at our Main, Ballentine, and Eastover locations!