Pipevine Swallowtail eggs hatch!! Now what?
annabananaflzone9b
4 years ago
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annabananaflzone9b
4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoMissSherry
4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoRelated Discussions
Pipevine Swallowtail Eggs Already!
Comments (24)Beth & Sherry, Thank you for your kind words. We are safe and things can be repaired or replaced. My photos and family mementos are safe so I feel blessed. It could have been far worse. Firemen were amazing and so professional. Insurance company also extremely helpful and professional. Everyone test your smoke alarms; they save lives. I have two pots of fimbriata in the greenhouse that are waiting for warm weather to be planted out. I also let most seeds fall in the patch so hoping for some new germination. Don't know, with such long freezes this winter, might have killed the seed and original plants. Will be interesting to see if anything survives of these little vines. We had long periods of below freezing conditions. Noticed yesterday pipevines are putting out leaves! Spring has finally arrived in my area. Mary...See MorePipevine Swallowtail eggs?
Comments (16)Whoo hoo, get your sissors ready. When these little cats get into 4th-5th instars, they are eating machines. I'm having to feed every two/three hours in mulitple cups. Their munching sounds like tiny little hailstones hitting something, all the clicking going on, with little faces moving back and forth on the edge of the leaf like a typewriter. I thought Monarch cats ate a lot but I do believe these Pipevine Swallowtails can outdo them! Mary...See MorePipevine Swallowtail Eggs
Comments (8)I forgot to answer your question about giant swallowtail host plants. I have several wafer ashes, and that's the favorite of GSTs here. I had to cut nearly all the leaves off all of them to feed my GST cats this year, plus I used rue. They didn't lay any eggs on my orange or satsuma trees this year, so I didn't use citrus leaves. Two of my young rue plants died recently right after the heat wave we had in June, and another one has dead parts on it. I've got one rue plant that I've had for years that's still going strong. It's growing in the shade of a my Ellen's Blue butterfly bush and a rose bush, so I think they really need the shade. I'm thinking about replacing the dead rues with more wafer ash/Ptelea trifoliata. I had planted rue, because black swallowtails use it, too. So maybe I'll replace the dead rues with wafer ashes, and when they've attained some size, I'll plant some rue underneath them. And maybe I'll plant some rue in the shade of other plants, like my big orange tree. The leaves have all grown back on the wafer ashes, which is good. I've released 27 giant swallowtails so far, and there are a good many chrysalides left, so I'll probably be needing more GST host plants soon! Sherry...See MoreSurprise Pipevine Swallowtail Eggs and Hatchlings!
Comments (17)It takes a long time (or at least mine did) for A. tomentosa to 'volunteer' as my mother-in-law used to say. If you don't want the volunteers, you can either mow over them or pull them up (as Mary suggested), cut them and feed them to your pipevine swallowtail caterpillars elsewhere (I do this), or you can dig them up and baby them in a pot until they get settled, then, either give them to friends or plant them somewhere else in your own garden. My first PVS butterflies from this year's crop emerged this morning, both females. These came from caterpillars I got from Rick in Alabama. It's so windy, I hate to release them today, and tomorrow we're supposed to have big rain, so I'm trying to decide when to release them, a good problem! :) Sherry...See Moreannabananaflzone9b
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4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
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4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
4 years agolast modified: 4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
4 years agoannabananaflzone9b
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Iris S (SC, Zone 7b)