Our Dill Weed is the Hostess with the Mostest!

Just the other day, Jack was explaining to me that the dill plant, which he has growing in the back yard, is a host plant for the black swallowtail butterfly larvae. Here's a picture of a black swallowtail butterfly that I took a few weeks ago out at my parents house. ~As you can see, they are huge and beautiful! When Jack told me about the dill plant, I said, "That's awesome!" but, I worried because I hadn't seen any black swallowtails around our house. We have had lots of Red Admirals, Painted Lady's & Eastern Tailed blue butterflies, but no black swallowtails that I knew of. Then just yesterday while I was cutting the grass, I noticed something on our the dill plant...

And wouldn't you know, these are the larvae of a black swallowtail butterfly! How awesome is that!? Once again, the black and white are designed to look like bird crap. Yum! At least this guy has got pretty red spots, as well. Just wait until the next stage. Gonna be crazy! Anyway, we are very excited about these guys. There are four total and we are hoping that they all survive and that we get to witness the different stages of their metamorphosis. I'll be sure to take pictures everyday to note the transformation from day to day and then share it here later. You may remember that back in October Jack wrote a post, Don't Judge them by their Poopie, Smelly, Poisonous Covers, about some giant swallowtail butterfly larvae that we had living on one of our citrus trees. He ended the post with a few pictures of the butterflies in their chrysalis' and we had hoped we would see these butterfly emerge this spring healthy and beautiful and that we would be able to share that here. However, just a week after Jack's post, I found one of the giant swallowtail butterflies laying in Bella's food bowl. Apparently, Jack grew tired of them lazing about and thought maybe the dog would like to eat them. JK! The food bowl was directly under the poor things chrysalis and it was apparent that it had emerged and fallen into the bowl.

~Such a sad sight! It was just laying there, helpless. It was still alive and it could walk but it was very obvious that something was wrong with its wings and that it couldn't fly. The wings were folded oddly and crumbled up. It may have had something wrong with it that caused it to emerge prematurely or, just have fallen before it was able to pump fluid into its wings and expand them fully. This is critical for the butterflies to ever be able to fly! I took it out of the bowl and placed it on the grass hoping it just needed more time to dry it's wings off. But after a while it was still there. So, I picked it up and placed it on our lemon tree thinking that might be a better place for it to rest.

It just hung on the tree. Occasionally it would fall of and land on the patio and I would pick it up and place it back on the tree. The next morning, I was happy to see that it was still on the lemon tree, alive. But, it wasn't looking any better than the night before.

Later that day and after Jack had done some research, we were talking about purchasing a pair of butterfly wings (amazing that you can even do that!) to attach to it to see if it would then be able to fly. We thought it might work because everything but the wings seemed o.k. and we really wanted to save it!

But, before we could act on the thought, it died. I had gone outside to check on it just shortly after I had attempted to feed it with a sponge soaked in a sugar solution and I found it on the patio. I will admit, I cried. It was sad to see something so beautiful and so delicate die and I hated that it had suffered in it's short time alive. The other chrysalis (there were two total) continued to hang on our house until just before spring this year. We like to think that this one made it, that it completed its time in the chrysalis, emerged healthy and flew away gracefully. We also hope this is what will happen with our four new tiny friends! Stay tuned, hopefully this will be a good story with a happy ending!