Hi, Sandy, and congrats! When I saw your post my first thought was, gee, they're early! Heehee! My S. hebecarpa died a couple years ago. I have S. bicapsularis coming up, but it has to get really warm here for them to take off with much growth. I love S. hebecarpa in bloom - it's gorgeous! I had 3 Red Admirals on the butterfly feeder late yesterday afternoon, so am confirming they are plentiful this year! Susan

I absolutely love coming to this forum just to oogle the photos! You folks have such spectacular images of these beauties! I -am- jealous! Here is the 1 and only butterfly I managed to snap a photo of on my recent trip to SoCal the end of Sept. this year. S/He was a bit ratty with one hindwing tail portion missing, I'm not certain what it was, a swallowtail? It was nectaring on a bouganvilla, Flitting here and there. So it was a bit difficult to capture an image... Thanks for looking! ~Tina

Actually, I found out a little trick by accident, lol. I tried to feed her one day, and had no luck getting her to unroll her proboscis, and since they are so feisty/hyper and so tiny/delicate I stopped trying and gave up. Well the next day, I noticed she was perched vertically on the side of the mesh cage and she hadn't moved in a while so i did the little "blow" test to see if she moved and happened to notice that right when I did it, she started unrolling her proboscis, so i did it once more and she unrolled it again. So I hurried and made some more sugar water and i got two toothpicks, I wrapped cotton around one toothpick and soaked it in the sugar water, I kept the other toothpick in my other hand and then I picked her up (wings folded, in between my index and middle finger) and I turned her to where she was facing me and lightly blew into her "face??" and as soon as her proboscis started to come out from that little groove, I hurried and put the toothpick inside the little loop and tried to finish unrolling her proboscis, and ran into another issue, lol, their proboscis is soo long, that when you try to unroll it with the toothpick, it gets wrapped around it too tight to finish unrolling, like it gets stuck, so I ended up putting the toothpick underneath the little loop and was able to get it unrolled without any problem and as soon as i got the tip onto the soaked cotton, she left it there and started drinking right away. I held her the whole time, they are so fast, I was afraid I would never catch her if she took off. The cloudless sulphurs seem to be very very delicate compared to the gsts, I noticed ANOTHER leg in the reptarium when I was cleaning it out the other day, long after she had left, and I barely handled her at all while she was indoors, in fact I think I only picked her up twice. The GST i had for three weeks (due to bad weather that prevented me from releasing her) never lost a single leg, or anything else, and I picked her up at least once everyday for 3 weeks to hand feed her. I don't know how the sulphur lost two legs in less than 3 days, she seemed to get around fine in the mesh cage, and anytime I saw her zooming around or getting anxious, I darkened the room and she calmed down almost immediately, so idk. Apparently, she was able to get around just fine even though she had lost a leg (or two) because she didn't seem to have any trouble whatsoever climbing or walking, and her balance didn't seem to be off at all. Just thought I would warn you about he leg issue if you are keeping your CS in a mesh enclosure, not sure if this is a common problem or not.

Sherry, I planted Bahama Senna (previously Cassia bahamensis) in March of this year. If you remember this plant suffered from some type of borer earlier in the summer. Well now it is starting to bloom and I found the first Cloudless Sulphur Caterpillar. I had one cat on this plant right after I planted it in March. That cat started out yellow because there were some old blooms on the plant but the cat turned green when I had to feed it new growth instead of flowers. It was very interesting to watch. It pupated and eclosed just fine. Hopefully, I'll have enough flowers or flower buds to keep this cat yellow. Anna