I just checked and today it's just the opposite. I have about a dozen male flowers open and only two female flowers open. I cut a male flower off and cut away the petal part and used it to pollenate the two females. You can see the orange colored pollen laying in the bottom of the male flower. I did this two days ago and see one zuke about six inches long has formed already. I see many ants inside the flowers, what are they after, the pollen or the nectar? I also saw one lone bee go inside one of the flowers but it apparently died right before my eyes as it just sat there immobilized. I saw a dead bee inside one of my asian pear flowers a month or so ago too. I wonder whats killing them. I don't use any pesticides so it isn't me.

Sherry, Is raising the Spicebush Swallowtail basically the same as raising say, the Red Admirals? I know that you had told me that the false nettle should be kept in containers or otherwise kept in water, as the leaves wilt quickly. So far I've only raised Monarchs, Black Swallowtails, Giant Swallowtails, a few American Ladies, and a Wild Indigo Duskywing (it basically raised itself...I discovered it after I brought a potted B. australis in on our back porch and saw that it had been on it awhile eating the leaves). I wish I knew which species are somewhat on the difficult side to raise so I could be prepared how to raise them. For instance, I know that you had said American Ladies are that way (I think you had said that anyway) and so instead of just bringing some leaves in off of the plants, I sat some potted Pearly Everlasting out by the pussytoes that the AL's where on. They crawled onto the potted plants and I brought them in on our back porch and raised them. Although I would love to raise every cat and egg I see outside, I don't see how that's possible. I had a difficult enough time a couple years ago raising over 500 Monarchs. I've planted lots of kinds of host plants to get probably at least two dozen species of butterflies. If I gets lots of each kind, I think I'd just have to begin dabbling in each one instead of going gung ho on the Monarchs. If I'd attempt to rescue every cat and egg out there, not only would time be an issue, but I'd imagine that I'd have to have tons of potted plants to sit in a protected area, which I just can't do. You'd almost need a whole greenhouse just for that. You don't raise every single cat you find outside, do you? I'd like to protect them all, but I just don't see how I can. What I want to understand is what makes raising American Ladies more difficult than raising Monarchs or Black Swallowtails. Is it because cats that are in nests aren't as adaptable to a new location, i.e. being moved from their nest to a potted plant? Or did you mean that the plants that they're on (mine were on pussytoes at the time) aren't easy to keep from wilting? I just wondering if the AL's are better off left outside on the plants? Perhaps a person could build a screened container that's open at one end and turn it upside down in a particular area of the bed of pussytoes and put the cats in that area. Then when they've pretty much ravished that area, the container could be moved to another part of the bed. Hopefully all of those cats will have gotten their fill of the plants and be ready to pupate by that time. In the meantime, I'm sure the plants in the other part of the bed acquired eggs/cats. I always worry about having enough food for the cats here, no matter what kind of cat it is. I bought a few Lindera benzoin in 2007 online. They were only half a foot or so tall back then, but now they're 3-4 feet tall. I keep looking forward to someday finding cats on them. I think SBST are just the cutest cats with those eyespots! Being that you've raised pretty many kinds of butterflies, are there are that you find especially difficult to raise for one reason or another? Cathy

Well, I'm almost afraid to say this but I haven't seen a moth in 2 weeks. Of course I still have my HVAC registers covered with insect screen but I haven't seen any behind the screen either, as I was seeing before. This happy state of affairs could be due to one or more of the following factors: 1. When the pest control guy applied a little bit of spray in about four places (without drilling the walls... heck, he hasn't even called me back about that...what am I paying these people for anyway??), by incredible good luck the spray happened to hit exactly where the larva were (yeah right). 2. My sealing up of every opening I could find from those two walls into the house, was a better job than I thought. 3. The moths are "between flights"; meaning that one generation is finished, and I won't see any more until the next generation of larva pupate into adult fliers. That could take anywhere from 3 weeks to almost a year. About the pheromone traps, when the pest control guys first came out they did try those, although they explained that normally they only work on the smaller moth species such as meal moths, clothes moths, and such. The big brown suckers usually aren't attracted to them. I think they were correct because I had adults flying in the same rooms as the pheromone traps and none went anywhere near them. Mona, how are you doing? Who is winning, Team Mothra or Team Charlotte? (okay I read 'Charlotte's Web' a long time ago but I still don't like spiders much)

The first batch of what I thought were seeds in the original post turned out to be a false alarm. Finally, this morning, seeds seem ripe. The stalk they were on had turned from orangish to brownish, and the seeds came off with just a slight pressure. Can't express how excited I am!!