The Caterpillar and the Ladybug

This is a story about a caterpillar and a ladybug. 

While out in my garden, digging up some dill plants to share with a friend, I noticed something tiny crawling on one of the plants.  Imagine my surprise when I spotted it!  It was tiny caterpillar, a pale lime green with black. yellow and white markings.  My first response was to kill it.  I had no idea what it was.  So I googled it.  And now I am glad I let it live,

Turns out it is the larval stage of the Black Swallowtail Butterfly.  How exciting!  The tiny caterpillar was very pretty and the adult swallowtail will be absolutely beautiful.  I began to question my need for dill when it would be so much more enjoyable to raise some butterflies.  I seldom use dill in anything I cook anyway.  

The Black Swallowtail female lays tiny yellow eggs on dill, fennel or parsley plants.  She attaches them to the stems and the underside of leaves..  

The larva hatches and goes through 5 stages of development.  Each time shedding its skin, which is full of proteins.  They will turn around and eat it.  I was getting more and more excited.  I couldn't wait to see all this in action.  At the end of its growth the caterpillar creates a pupa or chrysalis around itself.  The pupal stage lasts around 18 days.  

female

At the end of that stage the butterfly hatches and metamorphosis is complete   A beautiful butterfly emerges from the chrysalis. The wingspan for females is about 6.9 to 8.4 centimeters.  Males are slightly smaller.  The upper wing is black with two rows of yellow or white spots.  These spots are brighter and larger in the males.  The females have blue spots in between the white markings.   

male

When I went outside the following day, there was no sign of the little guy.  I looked everywhere.  I turned leaves over and examined every part of the plant, but I could not find it.  I wondered about the time of day.  When I had seen it earlier it was almost dusk.  Maybe it was too hot or perhaps too windy today.  Then I saw the ladybug!  I removed it from the dill plant and put it onto the rose bush.  

I googled some more.  Ladybugs this time.  It turns out that they are not the sweet bugs of stories and wishes.  They are actually vicious hunters.  They love aphids.  I used to buy them in bags of thousands to try to control the aphids on my rose bushes.   I would keep them in the fridge and release a handful into the garden on a sunny day.   As they warmed up I hoped they would prey on the aphids.  

I remember the year of the aphids.  It was sometime in the 1980s. The sky was green with them.  Farmers worried about their crops.  Some well meaning, but not too bright biologists determined that what we needed was thousands of ladybugs.  So the imported as many Asian lady beetles as they could find.  These ladybeetles were yellow to dark burgundy in colour.  The problem with this Asian variety was that they were bitters.  Not pleasant!  I was bitten many times by this species.  Also they tended to  congregate in large groups, while our native ladybugs are solitary.  When it got cold they wanted to come indoors, in large swarms, to keep warm.   I don't know if they helped the aphid invasion, but they certainly created more problems of their own.  

While ladybugs love aphids, they will also eat caterpillars and other soft bodied insects.  ladybugs are very beneficial to the gardener.  They are voracious and efficient consumers of insect pests.   A single ladybug will consume thousands of insect pests in its lifetime.  In that way they not only benefit gardeners but farmers and other food producers too.  Ladybugs don't sting or bite.  They don't transmit disease and they don't infest food supplies.  

So now what should I do?  I want ladybugs in my garden, but I also want the caterpillars to survive.  It's quite a dilemma.  I guess I will have to be more vigilant.  Keep my eye on things daily.  Maybe cover the host plant with some cheesecloth or something.   It seems this is going to be a full-time job.  But I think it will be fun.