2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
A cute butterfly could become one of the garden decorations, if not for its voracious children - caterpillars. They are able to cleanly eat the leaves of a fruit tree, leaving it without fruit for two or three years
Omnipresent and prolific
I must say that this butterfly has many different names, but they all revolve around the two words given in the title, so it is not difficult to recognize it. And you can meet her in any forest or garden where there is something to feed her offspring.
Your visit to the garden
Ringed silkworm applies at the end of summer. A light butterfly with a wingspan of up to 4 centimeters is easy to spot on the still green foliage. Males, however, are more modest in size, but 3 cm is not a millimeter aphid for you.
A butterfly is a flirtatious person. Its white-yellowish wings are trimmed with fringe, and in the center there is a transverse graceful strip, like a frill on a skirt. The butterfly has a lush hairstyle on its head, which women of fashion can envy.
I would have admired the beautiful creation of nature if I had not known about its fertility. One female is able to lay up to 500 cute eggs on tree branches.
Gluttonous kids
If the gardener did not have enough time or energy in the fall to remove branches with eggs or caterpillar cocoons and burn them in the flame of a stove or fire, then, after wintering safely, the butterfly children begin their sabotage mission in the spring.
Black caterpillars, covered with fluffy hairs, begin to devour young green leaves, flower buds and flowers that have time to open with an enviable appetite. Since at the beginning of life they prefer to live in cramped conditions, forming entire colonies, they very quickly deal with the foliage of the tree.
Cunning creatures attack trees at night, when a person has sweet dreams and does not pose any threat to them. During the day, they hide in arranged nests covered with spider webs. Here they can be overtaken by the punishment of a person who was not too lazy to get up early in the morning in order to collect comfortably arranged nests together with their inhabitants.
Two options for action
The gardener was not too lazy, he collected caterpillars and branches with a clutch of eggs, and what to do with them next?
You can go the simple way and put the pests on fire, so that they do not have a habit of destroying the fruits of someone else's labor.
And you can use butterfly eggs in the fight against them. The fact is that in nature, for any pest, there is another creature that feeds on the pest or its offspring. The Ringed Silkworm did not escape such a fate.
Insects follow in the footsteps of the butterfly
egg-eaters … While the adult egg-eaters feed on the nectar of flowers, their larvae feed on the eggs of other creatures. Egg-eating insects introduce their larvae into the maximum number of eggs laid by the Ringed Silkworm butterfly, thus providing their offspring with food for development and growth.
If you collect twigs with a clutch of eggs of the Ringed Silkworm in the spring, put them in a deep open container (for example, 7-10 liter plastic water bottles) and remove them away from fruit trees, an interesting and instructive story will happen.
By the time the Ringed Silkworm butterflies begin to lay new eggs on the branches, egg-eating insects that have grown from larvae in the nutrient medium will fly out of the bottle and begin to introduce their babies into the newly laid eggs.
Part of eggs not infected with larvae, which managed to turn into caterpillars in a bottle, will die due to lack of food. Such is the entertaining arithmetic.
Caterpillars - chameleons
The length of the Ringed Silkworm caterpillar is 5-6 cm. They are colored black only in spring. Caterpillars molt several times over the summer. Before turning into a butterfly, they turn gray-blue with longitudinal stripes: orange on the sides and white on the back.
In preparation for adulthood, they leave the community and crawl up the tree in splendid isolation. Then it becomes more difficult to catch them.
Be carefull
If you see completely eaten leaves on the trees, then the Ringed Silkworm has come to your domain.
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