June 13th, 2025

Butterflies, Caterpillars, and Blog Posts.

More Bugs.

The Blog.

Recently, I just so happened to look through my old posts page here on the blog to discover that it’s been over one year since I’ve started this, and the homepage looks like it hasn’t been updated in forever. I decided to do away with the “Royal Empire” blog, as I never got around to writing it, and I also did away with the old homepage. I set it to instead redirect to the blog homepage instead. I also went ahead and updated the blog homepage a bit too, adding a carousel with the latest post, featured post, and the previous post. It was a bit troublesome to get it to work the way I needed it to, but I managed to get it to function.

There’s also “tutorials” on this website, and although that page has been abandoned for a long while, I still want to add more content to it, but I’d rather move it to my non-blog website instead before continuing it (the other site needs its OpenACS upgraded, which is quite a process).

Butterflies and Caterpillars.

On one May 29th (that was a Thursday), I went outside, released the chickens, and I noticed a big butterfly flying around. I got the chooks to their designated area, and grabbed my camera to run back and take photos of it. It turned out to be a black swallowtail butterfly. I got some photos of it, out of which a few came out, and out of which I will share two.

The butterfly.

Turns out I caught it laying eggs.

It turns out, although for some reason it went over my head in the moment, that it laid its eggs on a dill plant. I was expecting to see some caterpillars show up, but I wasn’t sure where.

Early stage of Black Swallowtail Caterpillars. These are going to turn green soon.

went and checked on the 20 or so caterpillars every day from then on. They turned green, and now I’ve got a few fairly huge ones. They have also devoured most of the dill plant, and are currently razing the tall stem of the plant. Actually, they’ve just about devoured nearly two feet of dill stem and have about one foot left to go. The number also went down, as I only see around 10 or so. Presumably some have crawled off to find a pupating spot, or have died (I know two have.).

Picture taken a few days ago.

Picture taken yesterday. That’s the same dill stem, just mostly eaten.

I have not found any chrysalises anywhere, though with the amount of ground these things seem to cover, I probably would have a hard time finding them. I’ll post again about this, Godwilling, in a couple weeks with updated news on the chrysalises and butterflies that emerge.

EDIT: I usually write these posts the day before I post them (so this was written on 06/12/2025). All of the caterpillars have vanished, including the one making a chrysalis. I’m sad to say that I think some predator that hasn’t materialized until now got all of them.