It sounds like you have an everlasting jungle there, Sherry. ;-) I can see w hy it would be hard to keep track of individual plants since you've had your plants for probably a bit longer than I have. Being that my garden was just started several years ago, I can still keep track of individual plants of all the types...well, sort of...but that soon won't be possible. I'm curious to see how the everlastings will be here. Maybe I'm a more regimented type of garden person than other people, I don't know? Just don't ask to see the inside of my house though...ha! I have my plants in sections and they aren't allowed to step over their boundaries or they get yanked. My purple coneflowers are notorious for coming up in between the bricks in the path and getting pulled by the hundreds. I'll never plant Rudbeckia hirta here again because it wanted to go all over the place! I'm considering doing away with the last of my anise hyssop because I spend way too much time pulling up thousands of seedlings of that. Besides, it doesn't attract butterflies here at all anyway. I used to have 60 plants and am down to about 10 and it's still too many apparently. I have a bad back and hate to be bending over much. So it literally causes me pain to have to be pulling plants out so much. I put in some pathways to try to keep the garden sectioned off to make it easier to care for, but now the plants some up between the bricks! I really do love plants but sometimes they give me fits with their wanting to be overly prolific. Then in my upper garden where I wish they'd take over the weeds, the weeds want to take control. Anyway, I had wanted to ask that about the everlastings spreading because of the difficulty I have trying to keep things pulled where I don't want them. No, I actually didn't check the local fuzzy weeds with whitish leaves for American lady nests, but that's a good idea. I think I at least know what to look for now, being that I've had pussytoes for several years now with cats on them. I actually think that I did have AL cats earlier than I realized, thinking back on it. Before I knew better, I remember the first year (or maybe it was the second year) that I had the pussytoes, I noticed that they looked unhealthy. I thought it was because of the weather, but now I think that I had cats that year and didn't realize it. I'll be watching for those American Ladies to show up here. They seem to love the pussytoes that I've had here for a few years now, but I just thought I'd plant a few other species that they are known to like. It will be fun seeing which they like the best. Cathy

Congratulations! I think it would be better to feed them whatever weed they were eating. American ladies like cudweed and closely related plants. Painted ladies could be fed sunflower leaves - maybe they're painted ladies? Sherry

There is NOTHING wrong with opening the cups. In fact, I tell people who buy those kits (did you get the Insectlore kit?) to open it up and dump out the frass (poop). In the instrutions it also tells you that not all of the caterpillars may pupate, right? Something like, they guarantee that three of the caterpillars will turn into butterflies? The reason for this is because they don't tell you things like: 1. Moisture is BAD 2. Mold builds if moisture AND heat 'mix' 3. You will get all this silk in the cup 4. All that 'stuff' is frass/poop 5. Leaving the caterpillars amongst moist, old poop is not a good thing... I could go on and on and on. I teach a butterfly science course to teachers about Painted Lady butterflies and I ENCOURAGE the teachers to feed their caterpillars an organic diet instead of the artificial diet. Why? Because I've found that the caterpillars that eat the organic diet tend to become a little larger butterflies than those that eat the artificial. This sounds strange but after raising MANY PLs over the years, I did some experiments just to see which was 'best.' I know they've done loads of scientific experiments with the food but if you think about it, a caterpillar should eat leaves, right? Not this mushy stuff. So, Jess? Open up those cups. Clean out the frass. If any moisture is built up, air out the cups or wipe the cups out. Keep the cups OUT of any sunlight as this will just promote moisture to build. If you have access to the PLs host plant, feed them the leaves instead. (NOTE: Once you feed organic, they probably won't eat the artificial stuff so be sure that you have plenty of the organic! They eat Thistle, Lavatera, Cheeseweed...). Have fun and good luck! Michelle: You can get Painted Lady butterfly larvae from several sources. The two that I would recommend are: www.educationalscience.com www.insectlore.com If you purchase from Insectlore, type in WEB5 when you checkout to get a 5% discount.

Thanks, I did see your post and have some prairie sage newly planted this year. I have at least five different host plant species for them. The problem is they are just all so small still. If it was just one or two caterpillars it would be ok I think. The problem I had before is that every time I brought in food for the first few caterpillars more eggs hatched on it and their numbers grew exponentially. I ended up just having to put quite a few back outside on a host plant to fend for themselves when I couldn't find anything else they would eat. It seems these ladies regularly do very large egg dumps here and most of the eggs and tiny cats don't get eaten. I hope my prairie sage takes off soon, it was still a softball sized clump last time I checked. It seems the butterfly population and I can't get synchronized. A few years ago I had large numbers of monarchs and was running out of food. So I planted A LOT of milkweed that is now very plentiful and huge, but haven't had many monarchs since. The tigers and silver spotted skippers had a really good year a couple of years ago but I had no host plants at all. Now that I have good host plants for them, they are no shows. Hopefully if I just keep planting and increasing my stock of host plants all will get used eventually. I don't think that it helps any that they are currently doing mosquito spraying, gypsy moth spraying, and cutting down all the ash trees damaged by emerald ash borer. That is in addition to the non-stop herbicide and pesticide use.