Imperial moths must be on the upswing - I saw the first one I've seen in YEARS the other night, a male with a lot of purple in it -

{{gwi:492557}}

I've never raised any, just know that they use a wide variety of host plant trees, and that they burrow and make an underground pupae, no cocoon. KC raises them, and I be he'll post.

Your female is quite a beauty!

Sherry

If you have raised lunas and polys, you can raise these. Imperials do get a lot bigger than those 2 though so you would need more room and more food. The nice thing about imperials is they like pine (not spruce, not fir) and it is easy to keep pine needles in good shape vs. deciduous tree leaves. Other hostplants I use are sweetgum, oak, and Norway maple. Two hostplants I've tried that are on imperial lists are box elder maple and spicebush. Avoid those 2 since they did not work at all for me. If you look at imperial hostplant lists, you will see lots of trees that imperials will supposedly eat so you have lots more options than what I've listed. Whatever you use, have GOBS of it available because the 5th instars are eating machines. From my experience, 5th instar imperials will NOT change hostplants so if you run out of your hostplant, don't think you can get away with giving something else. They would rather starve. Plan accordingly.

Overwintering is the tricky part. Your south of me so it may not be a big deal. I had 100% success last year by using 5 gallon buckets filled with fresh, store bought topsoil (very moist) and then leaving the buckets in my house. Problem with this was my moths eclosed a month before the wild ones so I could not attract a wild male. I still have 4 live pupae that won't eclose until next year (yes, imperials can still in their pupae for multiple years).

Instead of buckets of dirt, Sherry says to use containers filled with several inches of leaves. I've used containers with layers of paper towels. Imperials will pupate in either. The problems I've run into with these methods is keeping the pupa sufficiently moist. Too much moisture leads to mold and a dead pupa. Too little moisture leads to a dried out pupa. Up in Ohio, I'd have to put the pupae in a fridge so they will eclose with the wild ones. Refrigerators are what really makes this process tricky. Since you are in the south where the imperial is double brooded, I'm guessing refrigeration is unnecessary so your life will be easier.

Personally, I would not try to raise 126 imperials. It would turn into a full-time job near the end. I suggest you choose a hostplant that is plentiful around your area. Raise your extra (whatever # you decide is extra) on that hostplant/hostplants for the first 2 instars and then release the extras on those hostplants. Don't put a lot on the same tree since predators like nothing more than a target rich environment (some predator/predators had a field day when they discovered I had to let a bunch of 5th instar cecropias go in the same lilac bush many moons ago). The reason I say to release them as 3rd instar cats is that they have a better chance of making it since pesky predators like ants usually don't go after bigger cats.

And, in case you did not know it, your late instar cats will be different colors and some will be multiple colors. I like the orange ones the best.

Good luck.

KC

Another 2009 pic but a green one this time. Eating Norway maple. In my experience, I have not found a correlation between color and hostplant but YMMV.

awesome information ! Thanks KC ! I was mostly worried about the overwintering part but you are giving me great options. LOVE LOVE these pics !

I love those pictures, too, especially the orange one!

Sherry

I think I tend to have more brown ones than the other colors but I don't have pictures of them since they are boring compared to the others. I also get brown with orange stripes.

Since there's been a lot of interest in imperial moth caterpillars on this forum lately, this thread is of interest. I notice that the beautiful orange cat is eating sweetgum. Assuming that this cat successfully went through pupation and emerged as an adult the next year, then sweetgum must be a good host plant, right KC? If it is, and I ever get any imperial eggs, I'll use that to feed them, since it's so plentiful on my property, and it holds up so well in water.

Sherry

Sweetgum definitely works with the imperials cats I've had. I don't raise a lot of them on it because I use a boatload of sweetgum with my lunas.

I love sweetgum. Wish I had access to enough of it to raise most of my caterpillars. I have a bunch of small sweetgums growing on my property now.

Just re-read what I wrote in 2012.

One of my neighbors let me take over his white pine last year. Raised a bunch of imperials on it. Lots of bright green cats and brown cats. I don't remember a single orange one. So if you want to get an orange one, I suggest you don't raise all your imperial cats on pine.

Tried something new with overwintering this past winter. Met a fellow caterpillar enthusiast on Facebook and then at Mothapalooza last year. She told me her method for successfully overwintering dirt pupators. It is 5 gallon buckets kept outside and filled with top soil and peat moss. I want to say it is a 50/50 mix but I cannot remember for sure right now. Some of the regals and imperials emerged but not the majority. So, I'm doing better than some previous years. I still have to dig up the other pupae and figure out if they are dead or going to overwinter again. I still have some live 2012 imperial pupae that appear to be waiting for 2015.

Since I have so much sweetgum here, I'll definitely stick with that. I'm using it now for my lunas, and they're doing great on it, as usual.

I didn't know that big moths might overwinter for more than one year! I'll keep that in mind with the regals I have now.

Sherry

There are moths that spend multiple years as caterpillars. I have not tried to raise any of those yet and I cannot say that something like that is high on my list of things to do. Seems to me they live inside plants so you don't get to see them develop.

Since i posted this original message a few years ago, I used sweet gum for the imperials with great success! The tricky part is the overwintering and only about 60% of them emerged. I used the same method of a large bucket filled with dirt and put the buckets in the garage. This year I have only found males but no wild females Imperial. The imperial moths season just started here so I am keeping my fingers crossed. LOTS and LOTS of Regals around ....

A very beautiful Moth photo.

i am currently raising imperials right now a female decided to come up on our porch and start dropping eggs, i found a type of pine with fairly long needles that they are currently eating, i had no luck with maple or oak, though i found some walnut they seem to like as well i did get them all eating the pine, they are transitioning now out of their first instar stage, we shall see how it goes

My success rate with my outside buckets was piss poor this past winter. Very discouraging. On the plus side, a couple females that overwintered inside eclosed in sync with the wild population and I was able to attract males for both.

Added box elder maple to my imperial hostplant list this year. I have a lot of it and thought I would give it a try. I've had three box elder eaters pupate so far. I had avoided using box elder because I had found a sickly wild imperial on box elder some years ago. Some maple eaters cannot hack box elder so I figured that was the case with imperials too. Glad I had enough eggs to experiment this year and find out I was wrong.

Congrats, Arron! There's an imperial moth on my front door right now. I've had a lot of them this year, all males I guess, since they have so much burgundy coloring.

'Sounds like you've had a lot of imperials, too, KC!

Sherry

KC,

How can you tell if wintered over imperials are still alive or not. If there is no movement from the pupa when you hold it does it mean that it is dead? There was movement from them when I held them in the spring, but nothing now. I think I let them dry out to much.

Cathy

If you cannot move the abdomen back and forth, it is done.

Not wiggling on their own is NOT a sure sign they're dead. They just may not feel like wiggling.

Weight is the key to me. From experience, I can tell when they don't weigh enough. To get experience, I recommend finding the lightest one, breaking it open, and see what you find. Dead ones vary but you normally find large voids where you expect to see moth parts. Keep repeating until you kill one or think the next one feels heavy enough to be alive.

Don't mix years. That way, you'll know any 2014's still not eclosed next August are dead.

This is a little late to the actual request but willow is another good foodplant. In fact, we get larger animals from it than the next runner-up, oak. Pinus strobus and other pines consistently produce smaller (albeit sometimes healthy) animals. See http://lepidopteraresearchfoundation.org/journals/42/jrl_42_34_49.pdf

We love the polymorphism in the larvae.

They do best sleeved outdoors; indoors need to be kept clean, in low concentrations, with good humidity but without condensation/water, and with fresh foodplant. Awesome leps.

I'm so glad to see you saying that too warm and too wet is bad - I agree. Somewhere people read that they should spray all their pupae. If I did that, mine would all get moldy and die. A pupae, whether butterfly or moth, is sealed and doesn't need extra water. If it's not sealed, it'll die anyway.

On that last picture of the mating imperials, which one is the male and which is the female? Quite a few of them have showed up this year on my porch, both at night and hanging out in the daytime, and they've all had a good bit of burgundy coloring on them, so I assumed they were all males. But both of those in your picture have a lot of burgundy. I did see a huge imperial one time that had very little burgundy coloring, was nearly all yellow, so I was sure she was a female, but that was the only one I've seen like that.

You said willow and oak do well for your imperials. I've only got two small willows, but I've got plenty of oak - several different varieties of red oak (many water oaks, several reds) and several different types of white oak (quite a few post oaks, bluff oak (Q. austrinum), swamp chestnut oak, a hybrid swamp chestnut oak with ?, and one chinquapin oak). The leaves of the white oaks look more tender, like they'd make better caterpillar food than the reds, but I've found plenty of caterpillars on the numerous water oaks here.

Have you used sweetgum successfully with your imperials like KC has? There's plenty of that here, too.

Your pictures are great!

Sherry

KC,

To my great surprise one of the Imperials enclosed a few days ago. It was a male. So far nothing from the rest. I wish I had more experience determing whether they were alive or not by their weight. But I'll check them, then have my friend with more experience check them. The pic of the large green imperial cat is huge! I fed mine white pine and I thought they were big, but not that big.

I meant eclosed above. I wish this program would stop fixing my "mistakes"!

Sherry, the one on top is the female. Note lack of brown/purple on outer part of upper wing. Didyma form imperialis is tougher though. Females can have gobs of brown. Didyma is the most prevalent color morph in the south according to literature.

Yes, it is harder to kill them with dry than with wet in my opinion, not that slightly damp soil isn't best medium.

I would use just about any oak before pine. Don't get me wrong, I have a few on pine now but they are outsized by willow, most oak raised specimens and most on sweetgum (yes, I like it too). The pine does about the same as maple, which i am using this year also. Thanks, I'm glad you like the pics, great subject matter.

catgirl, that is a nice one for pine. Looks like a very healthy animal. Out of 40 or so, we had one not eclose but still definitely alive and likely waiting until next year. Usually, a fingernail to the first segment soft spot will invoke at least a little wiggle from live pupae. Weight is best though unless recently perished. If you took a pic with a hand for scale and weight of pupae, I could probably tell you if it is alive or not.

I would never use pine, kcmatt - it looks so unpalatable! :)

I deleted my picture of an imperial I took this year, because it looked just like the one I took last year. I'll have to look up 'didyma' , didn't realize color morphs existed.

So this 2014 imperial moth is likely a male?

Sherry

Hi

Does Imperial moths or regal moths live in minnesota? I would love to raise imperals.

Thanks

Jacob, no, at least not as regular resident. See records map on this page:

http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/species/Eacles-imperialis

This doesn't have all records out there, but is useful to see general/common ranges.

The imperials we talk about here are Eacles imperialis imperialis. They don't do VERY cold weather. Farther north, the subspecies Eacles imperialis pini lives. It is basically a pine specialist. I believe they could handle Minnesota weather but they are not found west of Michigan.

On the Butterflies and Moths map, the northern dots would be E. i. pini.

Regals are even less likely in MN. bananasinohio told me about some research she read that showed regals are a southern US species that evolved to move north but not where it is too cool for it. The paper thinks their evolution is intertwined with persimmon. Their ranges are pretty much the same and the biggest HHDs are raised on persimmon.

I know someone who raises E. i. imperialis with good success in high Wisconsin latitudes, he fails with C. regalis outside, he suspects due to lack of heat. Regalis loves heat and humidity.

@kcmatt i have had great luck with pine, since the eggs were laid on concrete i had to put a bunch of different food in and they all chose pine and walnut i ended up switching them all to pine since it was growing in the back yard. They have been gorging themselves ever since i have a habitat in a 5 gallon pvc bucket, they are extremely large now had about 60 eggs hatch have about 50 caterpillars waiting for them to pupate any day now

We raised some on pine this year also. They do fine on it, just don't attain the sizes we get from other foodplants. That is pretty well documented in literature also, e.g.,:

"Larvae in the 1989 follow-up growth experiments, conducted under modified conditions where foliar water was more rigorously ensured, consistently gained biomass and molted earlier when fed post oak than when fed pitch pine, unambiguously demonstrating enhanced performance of E. imperialis on wild Q. stellata relative to wild P. rigida based on larval growth and pupal weight (Fig. 6; Tables 4, 5), again with significant differences attributable both to food plant and to maternity in each of the host plant treatments (Table 6; Figs. 7, 8)."

Life history of the Imperial Moth Eacles imperialis (Drury) (Saturniidae: Ceratocampinae) in New England, U.S.A.: distribution, decline, and nutritional ecology of a relictual islandic population

------------

Congrats on the good brood results, they are an awesome species. Good luck finishing them out.

I'm in VT and have just raised my first Imperials from eggs sent to me from Ohio. I've had great success with white pine. They grew to be 16-18g. I cleaned their frass out 2x daily and never handled them, I was worried about passing on bacteria (rightly or wrongly so?) The changes in each instar are really interesting! I do not have experience in this, but I know we do not have native Imperials up here in the fridgid north. I have just 12 pupae (started with 16 eggs, so not a bad survival rate I thought)...when they eclose I'll just have to enjoy observing them. I hope to attract some of our native giant silkworm moths this spring and obtain eggs.

I believe I have a burgundy imperial larvae. I do not have any of the hostplants or anything on the l list of things they eat. I actually found it on my calidiums under my sycamore tree. Please help. I would like to watch it thrive and turn into a moth.

If it won't eat the calidiums or the sycamore, it may already be ready to pupate and imperials go underground to pupate.

This article is good for how to raise your caterpillar.

https://butterflywebsite.com/articles/lizday/moth.html

I’m in SA TX and found this imperial today in our back patio column. I’m assuming it’s laying eggs but they are bright yellow. Also it was around 1:30pm. So far everything that I have read states they lay eggs at dusk. Any info would be great.

They are eggs. Imperials are not too picky about where they put their eggs. Up to the caterpillar to find something to eat.

i am raising Skipper caterpillars.

Long-Tailed-Skippers and Silver-Spotted-Skippers