Butterfly Gardening Blog

We went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens for Chinese Days again this year. I’m not usually at the garden this time of year so there were different things blooming than what I am used to seeing there. Mostly tulips.

In the morning our arbor/trellis/whatever-you-call-it blew over in the morning and my husband had to set it back up before we could leave:

Here’s some pictures of the tulips:

Here’s the entrance to the Chinese garden. This a traditional entrance to a Chinese garden, a moon gate, and is circular to symbolize perfection.

And the sign at the entrance:

This is the beautiful pond area in the Chinese garden. Both the bridge and the overlook were carved in China from white marble:

Here is the parade just as it was finishing up:

I found some baby preying mantis that had just hatched today! I was able to only get a few quick pictures of them before they all started running away. ( you might need to click on the image to see them more clearly)

Here’s the egg sack they came from:

There’s a pond near our house that I stop by sometimes when walking my dog. There are many different birds all around it.

Today, I saw some geese – and a nest with eggs in it!

Here are the eggs:

I don’t know what kind of bird this was:

My one Pipevine Swallowtail pupa – from the only Pipevine Swallowtails caterpillars that I’ve ever had – that I took such good care of over the winter – my dog attacked and possibly ate. Killed anyway. It was in the jar shown a couple of posts ago. She’s not my best friend today.

My wild violets – Viola sororia – are blooming! They are so pretty when blooming in large groups. Unfortunately this year, since I’m behind in getting the garden cleaned up, some of them are covered by dead plant debris from last year. I got some uncovered over the weekend though:

My Bird’s Foot Violets (Viola pedata) are blooming too! Something has eaten some of them though.

See close up – you can see where the flowers were bitten off the stems:

I also have a prairie violet Viola pedatifida (I think that’s the right spelling), last I checked though it was just barely coming up, definitely no blooms yet.

Someone asked about how I keep my pupa over the winter. I used to have an enclosure that I could raise caterpillars in and let them pupate also. It started falling apart and I don’t have a new one yet. I don’t really raise that many anymore anyway, so I don’t have that many to overwinter.

The ones I do have I keep in canning jars, and use mosquito netting to allow air circulation but to keep predators out. They’ve usually pupated on sticks which I can then break to fit into the jar. And I keep the jar outside, usually close to the house.

Here is a picture of one jar from the top:

Here is just the lid and the netting:

The netting is the kind with only really small holes. Some parasitic wasps are very small and it has to be able to keep them out. Here’s a close up the netting, my camera doesn’t do close ups of tiny things though, so it may not be that helpful:

I had a couple of Black Swallowtails who I had pupating over the winter emerge today!

I think it is a bit early for them in this area though – I don’t know if they will do very well. Its been rainy here too.

Here they are in the jar they pupated in:

Here’s the first one after I got it out:

Here they both are:

They were very small, which isn’t that unusual for butterflies that started pupating late in the previous season.