Did someone turn up the heat in here?
I’m so excited I finally get to post something cool here.
Several weeks ago I saw a monarch butterfly lay eggs on our milkweed plant. Today I went out to see if I could find a caterpillar. While I was out there, yet another monarch stopped in and laid even more eggs! I got to see her wrap their abdomen around to bottom of leaf and lay a single tiny green egg.
Some pics!
Can you see the tiny green egg in this pic?
Love these, Jeff! Especially that charismatic caterpillar close-up!
I spotted the egg I think :D
Yes!
I am so good at this game :O
Meanwhile: still looking for my basement keys, for 3 months.
Awesome! You’re so smart :)
One thing I’ve wondered is if a Monarch caterpillar will go around and eat other Monarch eggs to reduce competition. I’ve now seen butterflies lay at least 12 eggs but I’ve only seen one caterpillar so far.
I should also note I’ve been waiting YEARS to have a Monarch come to our backyard. Whenever we have wild milkweed grow, if it’s not in our lawn or ground cover we always let it mature, and it really likes growing next to this fence. So the fact we’ve had multiple butterflies this year is pretty astounding.
I can’t tell you anything insightful at all, but I remember a very poignant story when I was back in Ashiya, in Japan.
We were enjoying some meal outside in the crazy heat of the summer and taking cover under a tree near a building. Then came down something big, blam! It was a local Machaon caterpillar that had fell down the tree. It was fighting with a wasp. The wasp was stinging it but the caterpillar was still moving… and in a matter of minutes, ants were flooding from everywhere. The wasp flew away, looking pretty exhausted, while the caterpillar was still giving a huge fight. I didn’t stay to look at the outcome — although we all can take a guess.
We don’t have such magnificient caterpillars in France. Or maybe we did, but we most likely don’t anymore, in our land of pesticide.
Actually France is much, much better than the US in regards to the regulated use of pesticides. Trump in fact just killed off a ban on pesticides/insecticides that are known to cause human illness and of course shown to decimate honeybees.
Around our house our idiot neighbors spread tons of both, but we don’t use them on our lawn as we want bugs to thrive (except grubs and mosquitoes). We use mosquito dunks with natural BT to try and control mosquitos, but our neighbors just allow standing water to flourish, so we still get all of their mosquitoes. All in all I wish we had France/Europe’s tighter regulations on insecticides and pesticides :(
Ah, it is true it is much harder for the regular population, here, to be a nuisance to the living realm than in the US, or about any country I think (we also can’t buy a lot of commodities that would surprise most people around here!), but most of our economy is around agriculture, and the land has been barren for quite some time now. Some people are slowly trying to give back some life to the earth locally, but it’s a very difficult thing.
I remember twenty years ago, I had visited a botanical garden in south France. There was not a single insect around. It was quite a jarring and frightening atmosphere, a bit like when birds aren’t singing around in a zombie movie.
The irony is that the wild realm seems to be fleeing the countryside and sometimes taking refuge in cities. It is becoming more apparent every year, with more and more variety of birds here, and to some extent, insects. I think both may be linked, as a lot of the birds need those insects to feed, or so is my understanding.
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the popular sense here is that butterflies thrive only where the earth is clean — or that only a healthy place appeal to butterflies. So those Monarch butterflies flooding your place is a nice symbol — and maybe the hopeful sign that some of your neighbours are taking a step back on their noxious spreading!
And mosquitoes are nifty water cleaners, for the small price of some drops of blood! Cherish them!
How did that happen? Did France kinda go crazy for pesticides and insecticides for a while before they got wise and started to regulate things better?
It’s mildly regulated, which is better than no regulation, but pesticides are everywhere, so widespread you can find traces of them on anything grown far from any place it’s being used. And most of France is actually a huge agriculture field — it’s striking if you fly between France and Germany, you can tell instantly when you crossed the border.
I read a magazine trying out organic foods, vegetables and such, and traces of pesticide were found on any — nowhere near the amount found on “regular” ones, but still in alarming amounts.
Trying to rebuild, give back some life to the earth that has been abused for 60 years is apparently very longwinded, but one can still hope. In another magazine I had read, an association was talking about its efforts on the matter, and to sum up what I understood, it was taking from 5 to 10 years of working the earth without profit to merely get back into the numbers acceptable for the organic regulations of France — which are arguably harsh.
From my sensible, insect-loving point of view: insects are about nowhere to be seen, and reading again Fabre’s, the contrast is staggering.
Man, that’s a depressing talk. Please post more picture of the wild life of your frop bog instead!
Normally, the only insects we get trouble from are cockroaches and cicadas, but this week, we’ve been getting hit with a massive grasshopper invasion. This is what a little extra rain does to the desert. The wife and I went to the store last night, and walking across the parking lot sounded like walking on a bed of corn flakes.
OK, if Vegas has a three day blackout soon, it might be time to be worried.
Please send some over here as my frogs could use a feast.
