Congrats, congrats, Sandy! Those are really some good pictures of hard-to-photograph eggs!
Red admirals are among my favorite butterflies, and I really enjoy those ever-present sleepy oranges. If you have several good sized cassias in your yard, you should continue to get SO eggs and cats.
I found yet another tiny RA hatchling today - I don't know when they're sneaking in to lay eggs. So far, knock on wood, I'm not finding any dead cats/wasp cocoons inside the leaf rolls - YAY!
It's good that you've brought in the RA egg - those parasitic wasps seem to follow ovipositing RA females around.
Sherry

Thanks, Miss Sherry.

I'm looking forward to watching them both become butterflies. This particular SO preferred the new seedlings and totally ignored my large plants! I'd been thinking I needed to pull them up, but guess I'll leave them. I'll have a "cassia jungle" in one area of the yard, as I wasn't exaggerating about the number. I think BFs like areas that are out of control.

Sandy

Sandy--Congrats on finding those eggs! And thank you for sharing them here because it helps to see what they look like and where they are on the plant. The field guide always shows them super up close, so you can't really see what the egg would look like in reality.

I love that Sleepy Orange--don't think we get those here. I have to get over the fact that every time I see a small butterfly I think it's "just a sulphur."

Sandy, I prune my cassias nearly to the ground in early spring each year, then fertilize them, which causes them to make LOTS of new growth each year, like the cats like to eat. I find all the sulphur eggs on the tenderest new growth on the ends.
Sherry

Today I was outside close to the big batch of false nettles and saw a red admiral flitting around them. So I watched as she laid an egg on a stem, not the top bunch of leaves, and then I cut off the branch the egg was on and brought it in to raise - it is SO tiny! I stayed outside in the intense heat - why do butterflies lay most of their eggs in the middle of the day? - for as long as I could stand it, then went in, because she went under a magnolia leaf and hung upside down there for so long I couldn't stand the heat any more.
Does anybody know how those awful braconid wasps lay their eggs? Do they lay them on the leaves or directly into the hatchling cat? Do I need to remove the leaves on the branch, get fresh ones and wash them good? I think I'll do that anyway, but I'm curious as to how they do their damage.
I've brought in quite a few hatchling red admirals recently and found a lot of them had already been parasitized - I squished the cocoons or the tiny larvae, whichever was there.
I also watched a cloudless sulphur laying eggs in my garden on the Cassia bicapsularis and the volunteer, weedy C. obtusifolia that's coming up in places - I left it because I know the sulphurs like it so much. This female was very pale, nearly white, so in that respect, cloudless sulphurs are apparently like little yellows.
Sherry