I had an amazing day the other day finding SIX caterpillars of different ages in my yard. That’s a lot for me, especially this year. The wasps hover around my milkweed something fierce and eat them so fast. I also have never been able to keep a caterpillar alive who is less than say, a 5 days old because when they are that tiny they just can’t seem to get what they need from my milkweed set-up.
Here’s what I’ve tried. If you have some tips, please leave them in the comments!
I have a screened cage that’s about 2 ft x 1 ft x 16″ high. The caterpillars always make their ‘J’ on the wood strips along the top.
In the past I’ve put the milkweed in jars of water and the cats drowned.
So then I poked stem sized holes into lids over the water. That works so-so. I quickly use up all my top stems though and really need to be able to just use single leaves too. But when I put them in the hole, they shred a little and then wilt quickly after that.
This year I thought I had the answer. I received a bunch of florist foam and put that into two large bowls. Filled them with water to the top and the leaves were o.k. for awhile, but they really don;t seem to last even 24 hours.
Help? Anyone?
My wife and I collect Monarch caterpillars and raise them to the butterfly stage and release them. We find them in egg form and many times as small as a pencil lead (they had just recently come out of the egg). We have no problems with them. Our set up is 3 ten gallon aquariums with window screen tops. We collect leaves and keep them in a bag in the refrigerator. We only put in a few leaves when the cats are small and then more as they get larger. We sometimes have 100 cats in a single aquarium. We clean the fras and other material out every fee days (more often as the cats get larger). We line the bottoms of the aquariums with paper towels or used printer paper so as to absorb moisture.
We recently bought a couple of collapseable cages as at fleet farm that are designed for hamsters or guinee pigs, but they work great for transporting our little critters.
Hope this helps.