Jo's Boys

Back to Butterflies

There's been a bit of a butterfly lag here at the Jo's Boys household, since I was sick and then getting my husband ready to leave and then mourning his departure... every time I've looked outside it's been the same butterflies as normal, but yesterday I saw a new guy, and he graciously posed for me.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

I say "guy" and "he" because I *think* it's a male.  Now, I'm no expert, and my butterfly book is pretty sketchy in this department, but it's beautiful nevertheless...

...except that he's missing some tail parts.  See?  He only has his swallowtail parts on the right side, but not the left. 

Looks like something's been trying to eat him.

Or maybe that area got old. 

From what I understand, butterflies continue to fly until they have less than half of their wings left, so hopefully this little guy has a whole lot of life left in him!  :)

Oh, and to copy Farmgirl Fare (I just LOVE her blog), it's:

WEEKEND CAT BLOGGING!

My kitties match my son's decor.

There are two kitties and a teddy bear hidden amongst the camo bedclothes. 

The kitties were just way enthused.   They had eaten a big breakfast of raw chicken livers and were settling down for their all-day-long nap. 

My cats have it MADE.

Thirty Days to a New Habit?

You know what they say:  do anything for thirty days and it becomes a habit. 

Well, our house has been on the market now for over thirty days, so insane, bizarre, nutjob Monkline OCD cleaning is now a habit for me. 

Is that a good thing?  I dunno.

The good thing is that it has taken this situation (having to keep the house insanely clean at all times, since it' s on the market and I do NOT want to be left here by myself with the children for any longer than necessary) in order to show me that there are only so many hours in the day. 

I used to think that, since my house was never clean, that I was some sort of housewifey reject or something.  That I just couldn't keep it together.  That I needed Flylady or MOTH (Managers of Their Homes by Teri Maxwell) or something to help my inept self.  But I have since realized that wasn't the answer.

Back when my house was a disaster,  I read to my children during the day.  And not only that, I also cooked nice meals.  One cannot keep one's house insanely clean whilst also reading aloud to one's children and cooking nice, involved meals. 

So you choose your guilt, right?  One way, and you feel guilty that your house is a disaster (but you're reading to your children and cooking great meals).  Another way and your house is KICK ASS PEOPLE but you're not reading to your children and you're not cooking nice meals.  You're also not really blogging much, either. 

But thirty days into this madness and I'm forming my Own Darned Routines, Thank You Very Much.  And they take SO MUCH TIME.  I literally clean for probably six hours A DAY.  And that's not including laundry and meals (cooking them or cleaning up after them), nor does it include shopping. 

But my house is ONE CLEAN HOUSE. 

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Butterfly pictures all around! 

Today I have some Eastern Black Swallowtail pictures for your viewing pleasure! 

This is just about one of the most beautiful butterflies that come to my humble little butterfly garden.  They are so gorgeous it's shocking.

FROM THE SIDE

The above is an Eastern Black Swallowtail Butterfly on red Lantana flowers (even though the flowers look yellow, they are a red Lantana.  And if anyone who is thinking of planting a butterfly garden is reading this, let me just categorically say that the only Lantana of the thirteen colors in the garden that get attention are the reds.  So plant RED LANTANA.  RED RED RED.)

FROM ABOVE

I just love this picture.  Isn't this just a gorgeous butterfly?

FROM BELOW

Now, this picture is blurry, but bear with me ~ I only got one shot of this and I just *had* to include it on the blog, since it's a shot of the butterfly's UNDERSIDE.  I have seen shots from the side and from above, but not from below, and the underside of their wings are soooooo gorgeous.  So forgive the blurriness but I just had to show you the underside of the wings.  :)

Have a lovely day, and please say a prayer that our house sells soon.  It's t-minus two and a half weeks until my husband and best friend has to leave, and we can't afford to follow until the house sells.  So please pray. 

Desperately Seeking Crissy

The good news is that I got all new pictures of an all new butterfly that came to my butterfly garden!!!

This is a big, big deal for me because I've never seen this guy before.  And I'm a totally crappy photographer (no joke) in that I need to get basically up on top of the butterfly in order to get good pictures of it.  So I took probably forty pictures of this guy throughout the day, because she would come, I would try to take pictures, she would be scared of me, she would fly away, she would come back half an hour later, I would try to get pictures of her, she would be scared of me... and the pattern would continue...

So I got some pictures that I'm happy with, but alas!!!  I cannot use photoshop!  And one of my favorite pictures still has the stupid date on it!!!!

Which is where begging comes in.

::Ahem::

Oh Dearest Crissy of Everything Professionally Photogenic who I hope to live near sometime in the next fifty years, wilt thou, oh wilt thou please oh please have mercy upon a poor soul like mine that, alas, for reasons of technological ignorance, knowest not how to duly manipulate images such as thou dost?

See, the pictures of the first few are fine with just a bit of cropping

 

But then, oh then my camera broke my heart. 

::insert sounds of coughing/wheezing/choking here::

Well, folks, you can tell that I took that picture yesterday!! 

(snark)

Oh Crissy, I own Photoshop.  But HOW on EARTH do I get it to erase that date?????

It's fall? Says who? And when did THAT happen?

I'm not sure what it is with my camera lately, but it seems to have a life of its own. 

For example, it seems to relish taking photos of Skippers and it seems to abhor taking photos of butterflies.  I guess I should just be glad that something is turning out, and move on with my life. 

Well, the camera can't do justice to this guy's GOREGOUS turquoise (is that how you spell it?  Probably not.) coloring.  He's just breathtaking. 

I just love his long tail. 

Of him, my butterfly book says:

"The Long-tailed Skipper is especially abundant in the fall, when large numbers migrate into Florida from more northern points of the United States."

I'm sorry ~ it's fall?  When did it become fall?  Because it's still, like, a hundred zillion degrees here. 

Maybe if I'm lucky there will be some other pretty butterfly that pops up in my garden a couple of months from now, and then when I look up its information in my trusty butterfly book I will read:

"This pretty butterfly that just popped up in your garden is here because it is now winter, and this butterfly is migrating from places where it isn't Godawful hot into places where it still is, and always is, and therefore you are seeing it."

So that I will know that winter has arrived.

Big 'Ol Bummity Bummer

I had a Palemedes Swallowtail butterfly ~ I have NEVER seen one before in my butterfly garden ~ on my Lantana this afternoon...

By the time I grabbed my camera and came back outside, I was able to squeeze off only four shots of him by the time he flew away and DARNIT DARNIT DARNIT none of them turned out. 

So I swiped this photo from somewhere on the internet to show you what I missed

 

Darnit Darnit Darnit....

If a butterfly comes around often, I can usually get a pretty good picture if I am persistent, since a shockingly lot of them don't turn out.  But when someone like this guy has NEVER visited before (when I've been around to see it) the fact that I couldn't get any good photos (or even one acceptable one!) gets me down. 

:(

I have, for Dy, changed the look of my blog, even though she has the NERVE to not be pregnant. I thought she was pregnant.  I thought she was telling us that she was pregnant.  But, no.  She's not pregnant.  Darnit darnit darnit.  I cannot be pregnant again and thus I must live vicariously through my friends that can.  :)

While I didn't get a Palamedes Swallotail photo (darnit darnit darnit) I did get a Monarch, so the day, thus far, hasn't been a TOTAL loss.

In fact, some of my photos are (hopefully) going to come in handy for selling my house.  The last person who looked at the house was totally taken by the butterfly garden.  Until then, I had told me realtor, "Hey, Realtor, I have some pretty pictures of butterflies all taken in the garden, should I print them out and put them out or something for showings?"

The Realtor had said... well... that might be sort of strange...

... but after the last lady looked that the house and was enamored with the idea of a butterfly garden, the Realtor gave me the green light to make up a butterfly photo scrapbook, which I did last night.  I will put it out for the showings and I have only used the photos taken on site at the house.  It's a cute little scrapbook, so I hope it helps, as it is T minus a month until Mr. Jo's Boys leaves without us.  :(

The Popular Butterflies Shouldn't Get ALL of the Attention!

We are at the height of the Monarch and Queen egg-laying season.

Today it was as thought the ladies were almost literally fighting over the choice leaves and plants to lay eggs on! 

And while I got some great photos of a momma Monarch laying eggs, I'm thinking that today the *other* wonderful garden visitors need some press time.  They are just as beautiful (I think).

 

This is a male Fiery Skipper.

I think he's rather dashing.  :)

He's a butterfly, but a different *kind* of butterfly from the others, who are more popular and perhaps more showy.

He's also a HECKUVA lot smaller.

It's hard for you to see just how much smaller he is than the normal butterflies, but let me try to explain.

When I look outside my windows and there are the other (more popular and showy) butterflies on my Lantana, I can see them flitting about without any problem.  From that distance I would never be able to see this little, tiny skipper.  He's probably a fourth of the size of all of the other butterflies that come to visit me. 

He's almost the size of a housefly.  Really, really small.

And he zips around like a housefly, so it's really hard to see him.  But he's there.  :)

And this is actually a neat thing:  for ONCE it's a picture of a butterfly on a Lantana that *isn't* red!  You would think that the only lantana that I have is red, what with all of the pictures I post being butterflies sitting on RED Lantana!  And the other butterflies very much prefer the red Lantana, while this guy prefers the pink. 

Which is another reason why I probably like him so much... he's my pink Lantana fellow.  :)

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In other news, the house had another showing this afternoon!!! Yay!!!!

And the lady really loved the butterflies and the butterfly garden!  Yay!!!!

Because I would truly be heartbroken if the people who buy my house don't love butterflies.  That would be a real blow, I think.  Who wants to turn over their precious garden to someone who doesn't care about it?  Not I.  :)

Lost

I just lost a very, very, VERY long post that I had written about how my vacuum cleaner died, I borrowed my neighbor's, cleaned for ten hours yesterday, am very sore, have had nobody look at the house for more than a week and a half and am very depressed.

But I guess since that all fits in one sentence, God decided that I shouldn't bore you all with it stretched out in twenty paragraphs.

Then I was saying that while the inside of the house hasn't had any visitors (did I mention that we haven't had a single showing in more than a week and a half?), the outside certainly has.  Then I was talking about how I got some new butterfly pictures, but that they can't even begin to compare to Ree's phenomenal photography ,  especially her amazing wildlife closeups .

The Eastern Black Swallowtail... (you'll have to click on the picture in order to see all of it since Typepad has cropped it and you only see half of it right now!) my camera can't even *begin* to do him justice.  And this is a male, because he has a long row of yellow spots on the underside of his wings and he's much more showy than the female.

I almost NEVER see him in my garden.  I was so lucky to see him there yesterday, and even luckier that I had emptied out my memory card and had the space to record his comings and goings.

Right now I have a ton of Monarchs laying eggs on my outside milkweed!  I got some great pictures of a Monarch momma laying eggs, but since I'm having connectivity problems (and since the fact that if I lose this, my second post of this morning, I'll just curl up and cry all morning), I'm going to have to save the Monarch pictures for another time.

The Great Caterpillar Rescue of '06

Yesterday after posting my last entry, I wandered outside to lavish adoration upon my milkweed plants and caterpillars.

But what horrible, nightmarish sight met my eyes? 

A chubby Monarch caterpillar had been killed.  It had already been disemboweled and was in the process of being torn into tiny pieces by a wasp. 

Death by wasp is brutal.  A few weeks ago with another brood of caterpillars (my first batch of Queens) I had lost a caterpillar to a wasp.  I got a picture.  NOT for the squeamish.

The black areas are where the wasp stung it to death.   This is probably only about a fourth of the caterpillar that is left.

The wasps hunt for caterpillars because they take pieces of the caterpillar and insert them into their nest for their young to munch upon after hatching.  So a wasp will hunt for caterpillars and find mine. 

The wasp will then pull the caterpillar off the milkweed plant and drop it onto the ground (here the ground is mulch) and proceed to sting the caterpillar to death and then rip it to pieces, taking it piece by piece back to its nest.  Like I said, I came across the caterpillar like this and I didn't have to wait very long for the wasp to come back for another piece.  I killed the wasp but that didn't do this poor caterpillar any good.

Well, such was the similar sight that met my eyes yesterday morning, except that it was a monarch caterpillar this time.  And since I had plants loaded up with juicy caterpillars I did what any caterpillar-loving nature nutjob would do:  I bundled them up and took them to the Lukas Nurseries Butterfly Encounter.

When I had lost the first Queen caterpillar a few weeks ago (the one in the picture), I had gotten on the phone with them and they had told me categorically that they would take all of my caterpillars and put them in their enclosure (which had plenty of Milkweed), which would keep them safe from all predators.  I had not taken them up on this offer because I had not seen a large wasp/predator presence then, but lately the signs have been ominous.

During the last week, my front yard has been busy with wasps.  It was curious because the wasps were not attacking the caterpillars, they were scraping the trees.  I can only surmise now that they were scraping the trees for the material they needed in order to build their nests.  Now that a few days had gone by since the wasps (at least 10) had scraped the trees, I'm thinking that yesterday's caterpillar murder was the first in what was probably to become a huge killing spree.  They probably built a nest close by because of the nearby presence of my caterpillar babies/their food source.

So, like I said, when I wandered out into my garden yesterday and found caterpillar pieces all around, I freaked out.  I freaked out BIG TIME.  I knew that one was dead and that the slaughter had begun. I ran inside the house. 

In the amount of time that it took for me to grab the plastic bug carrier, one wasp had taken away the remaining pieces of the Monarch caterpillar and another wasp had grabbed a Queen caterpillar and had dropped it to the mulch.  When I ran outside the wasps flew away and the Queen caterpillar was still alive. 

Youngest helped me find each and every caterpillar on all of the milkweed plants.  We placed them all into the plastic container and brought them into the house for sorting. 

There were 25.

Twenty-five caterpillars, most of which were Monarchs but a few of which were Queens. 

Here's a better view of them (click to enlarge and see better).

They seemed pretty jazzed up about their journey to their new home, but some, of course, were in bad moods about having to leave their comfy food sources.

How were they to know that if they stayed here at our home any longer that they would become wasp food?  So there was much complaining and chaos.  We could tell that they did NOT like the plastic container. 

So we moved them out of the plastic container and into individual paper cups, one caterpillar per cup.  We even put a piece of milkweed leaf into each cup. 

Can you belive that they calmed down immediately?  Just goes to show that a caterpillar all alone in a tiny paper Dixie cup (with a tiny piece of leaf) is much happier than a caterpillar in a large plasic container with other caterpillars. 

So the kids had all 25 paper Dixie cups on their laps all the way to Lukas Nurseries.

And when we got there, they set us up a mesh enclosure all for them!!  The kids and I took each caterpillar out of its Dixie cup and set each one on its new milkweed plant, and then all of the Milkweed plants were zipped up into a handy-dandy HUGE butterfly mesh container.  HUGE. 

Then I bought the same size mesh butterfly zipper container and some new Milkweed plants and I brought it all home with me.  I have it on the back porch.  This means that as new caterpillars hatch (and they will, for my milkweed is loaded with eggs) I will put them on the milkweed on the back porch that is protected by the mesh container and they will be safe from all harm!  :)

It is a wonderful thing.

I didn't get pictures of my caterpillars at Lukas Nurseries because my memory card was all full, but we will be visiting them and I will bring pictures back with me. 

But they are all safe, so the story has a happy ending.

And I hope the wasps all STARVE TO DEATH.

The End.

What's Today??

I'm losing track of time. 

No, really.

When your husband doesn't work a set schedule and your children don't go to school and every day begins and ends like the rest, you tend to lose track of time.  :)

Yesterday was a shocker:  I took Oldest (12 year old boy) to the shoe store because he needed a new pair of sneakers.  So I asked the guy that worked there to please measure his feet so that we could choose the right size.

He measures Oldest's feet and then says: 

"You're shopping in the wrong department.  He wears an adult size. "

I actually yelled at the man, hollering, "NO he does NOT!!!!  You measure him AGAIN!!!"

Alas, Oldest was re-measured and then was sent along to the adult men's shoe department. 

::Gulp::

So my Oldest has Grown Up Feet.   

He's happily installed in size 8 men's sneakers now. 

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There's another batch of tweenagers that have grown-up-feet here at my home (and don't forget:  all pictures can be clicked on and enlarged):

See this big 'ol chunky dude??   Yep, that was one of the baby Monarchs from a few days ago.  He's now eaten about a zillion times his weight in Milkweed and now he's fat and sassy. 

See how he's such a chunk that when he climbs up on the Milkweed stalk he bends it down toward earth??  The flower he's sitting on *used to* point upwards like the other flowers on that Milkweed plant, but I was outside with the camera before he devoured this one like the hungry pestilence that he is. 

It was a good photo-op while it lasted (I think this was two days ago) because as of today there are NO flowers left on ANY milkweed and the milkweed, my friends, is looking bad.  It is looking rough.  But the teenagers are moving out soon so there's hope for the milkweed if it can just hang in there for another day or two.

Here's a closer view of him. 

He's hanging there, gathering up his strength to devour the Milkweed flowers.

In the background, on the leaf below/behind him, see those big round ball things?  Those would be teenage Monarch caterpillar frass.   Much bigger than when they were babies.

The flowers don't have a prayer.  Their doom is upon them.

This is a good time for a caterpillar anatomy lesson, boys and girls.  :)  (That link is helpful and the pictures are better than mine for detail).

Since a butterfly is an insect, when it is an adult butterfly (and even when it is a caterpillar) it has six legs. 

But it sure looks like it has more than six, doesn't it?? 

Well, the six "true" legs that become the butterfly's legs when it's all grown-up are actually the clawlike deals near its head, while the cute-looking squishy smooshy feetlike things are actually prolegs that disappear during metamorphosis.

The prolegs are totally cute (and look like its real feet) and are suction-cup sorts of things.  Actually, they usually also have a sort of spun web-like material that also helps to hold the caterpillar to the branch or leaf that it is chowing down on.

If you look closer at those prolegs, you will see that the feet resemble little paddles and it almost looks like the caterpillar is Velcroed to the branch, which actually isn't too far off from the truth.

So there you go ~ caterpillar feet.  :) 

Beautiful

I take a WHOLE LOT of pictures.

Usually, only 1 picture out of 10 or 15 turns out.

This afternoon, I found two cute little Queen caterpillars on the top of one of my Milkweed plants... on the flowers... eating the flowers (of course).

But even though they were eating the flowers, they made a cute picture:

 

You just HAVE to click on this one and enlarge it.  :)