Butterflies

  I started a garden this year and not long after the plants were growing I noticed the beans and tomatoes not doing so well. Their leaves had lots of holes in them and the plants were withering. I looked around a bit and found this monster on the tomato plant:

  And these little guys EVERYWHERE on my bean plants:

  I looked them up and found out that the big one was a tomato hornworm which turns into a 5-spotted hawkmoth. The little one is a long tailed skipper caterpillar which turns into a long tailed skipper butterfly.  I decided it would be cool for the girls to watch them turn into butterflies (and a moth) so we put them into their various containers with some leaves and waited. The tomato hornworm made a cocoon fairly quickly and the other little caterpillars soon followed after.

  A few weeks passed and a huge mouth emerged from the cocoon that the hornworm had made.

  All the while, I continued to pick caterpillars off of my bean plants and add them to my container. We had quite a few butterflies emerge from the cocoons the skipper caterpillars made and the girls had so much fun setting them free outside.

  My bean plants are still suffering from the skipper caterpillars.  There seems to be a new batch of teeny tiny caterpillars every week that I just cannot keep up with.  I have stopped keeping the little ones when picking them off of the leaves but whenever I find a big caterpillar, I put it in a container in hopes that it will form a cocoon in a couple of days.  Next year I think I might just be growing flowers in my garden.