Ruud Kleinpaste: Monarch Butterflies breeding tips

Lots of panic questions about Monarchs this year: in Auckland they are recorded as “pretty rare”, whereas in Christchurch I see them quite regularly and they’re doing fine in my garden.

There are always some troubles with wasps. These predators are quite keen to chew the monarch caterpillars to pieces and take the protein back to the wasp nest as food for their larvae.

It sounds awful and it looks awful; the common-German wasps (and Paper wasps) are, after all, imported pests that don’t belong here.

Keep your plants with caterpillars under netting; the wasps can not access them. Another trick is to grow your swan plants in large pots, which can be moved to new sites when wasps discover the precious cargo; the wasp’s GPS system is disrupted when you change the position of the swan plants.

Running out of food is often bad news – caterpillars starving

Always keep an extra plant or two under curtain netting, so female monarchs can’t lay eggs on those spare food plants!!

It also pays to reduce the number of eggs/caterpillars per plant (birth-control)

I must confess: I had some trouble managing the number of caterpillars this year: they we sometimes eating the tops of the naked swanplants… and in pairs!!

I tend to keep my caterpillars inside the tunnel house, so that the female monarchs couldn’t get at them to lay more and more eggs

“Go Fly to Auckland and Do something with your Life” is what I usually say… 

Sometimes caterpillars are found limp and dying

This is often caused by predation by brown soldier bugs (Cermatulus nasalis) who stick their sucking tubes into the caterpillars and slowly such them dry.

Look for the soldier bugs (brown version of the garden stink bug!!) and get rid of them!

Accidents do happen, especially when the last instar caterpillar does its very last change from Caterpillar to Chrysalis.

That in itself is a tricky manoeuvre: the caterpillar hangs from a small patch of silk while it takes its skin of. The trick is then to hook its chrysalis “claws” into the same white silken pad, so it can hang there as long as it takes to change into an adult butterfly.

There are a few videos that capture the way a caterpillar becomes a chrysalis; have a look at how the caterpillar manages that without falling.

But sometimes things go horribly wrong and if you discover a fallen chrysalis soon after the accident happened, you can carefully pick that very fragile creature up and literally hang it back where it needs to be…

Very delicate “First Aid”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
They'd be seven to eleven on News Talks. He'd be
a man in the Gardener's Rude Climb past. He's here
today the Rude.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Cure Jack and also congratulations will behalf of Julie and myself.
It's absolutely beautiful.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Well, we've got a bit of
a theme on the show this morning. Great breeding is
the theme and from the time Household to the Client
past garden and monarch butterflies.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yeah, and how they get born and all bit. I
don't know, I just feeling this might come up one
day and there it is. Yeah. You know, you know,
we all know about the monic butterflies and all that
sort of stuff, and they they they have all sorts
of troubles when they're in your garden. I mean, sometimes
you have not enough food. It's talking about food, you

(01:00):
know what I mean. And you know, we we have
these things growing as cut to pillars on swamp club
for instance, or a range of different Asclepias species which
are actually quite beautiful. But when they run out of food,
that's when things get really tricky. So a lot of
people ask what do you do when you haven't gotten
a food. Well, first of all, make sure you don't

(01:22):
get too many caterpillars, you know, avoid that sort of
stuff chet. And the way is that the female monic
butterflies lay egg after egg after egg on one plant.
And if you say a plant maybe a meter or
so tall, that could have maybe only five caterpillars or
six to make them go to the end.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Of their life size because they are of course hungry.
Hungry caterpillars.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Well, you think you've got a sun that's hungry, you
wait till he grows up as a boy. I know
how that works. But in order to avoid getting too
many caterpillars on your plants, for instance, I keep my
caterpillars inside the tunnel has so no female monarch can
get in and lay more egg on that particular plant.

(02:08):
You know, I tell these females fly to Auckland and
do something with your life. Go away anyway. So that's
those are the sort of things. And the other thing
that you can have you can have troubles with wasps.
So if you got your plants outside with the caterpillars
and you suddenly realize that the number of caterpillars are diminishing.
Check for wasps flying by the German wasp, common wasp,

(02:31):
paper wasps on that because these guys literally are predators,
the kinivores, and they will eat and destroy your your caterpillar.
So be aware of that. Good trick. Here, grow them
under netting so the wasps can't get them, or put
them in big pot plant pots, and then you actually
change their position around the house and then the GPS

(02:53):
system of the wasp goes like, I know that was
a caterpillar here, where the hell is it? And they
can't find it. It takes weeks for them to find
it again. Oh that's a.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
Very good tip. Oh thank you. Okay, that's a year.
That's really really good advice. Love it.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, yeah, yep, yep, that's the one. And then finally,
and this is something that happens with the birth of
the chrysalis to a of a caterpillar to a chrysalist.
Sometimes can you imagine that you have to take your
skin off and then hook your your caterpillar toll if
you like, into the silken bed that is a really

(03:29):
that is circu to so lay in your garden.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Yeah, I knew it.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
I knew it and you know all about it though,
So there you are. So you read it on the
Stuff on the Air website and you'll find out you
can hang them back up, just like.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
That superb excerpt, Catching your next make for climb pass
in the garden for us.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
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