Congrats on the Black Swallowtail. I appreciate that you are trying to be reasonable about wasps. I'm fine with them if they stay away from the eggs and cats on my plants--but they don't. When I see them on the plants I try to eliminate them.

Black Swallowtails have a lot of predators early on. In my garden ants and lizards get a lot of the small ones and birds, especially Cardinals, seem to get the larger ones. The wasps will get them at any size.

Yesterday I found about ten little cats on one flower of green fennel. If they are still there later today I'm going to transfer them to a safer place on a bigger plant.

Do the wasps eat the eggs that quickly or do you think the BST just thought there likely was a safer place for her eggs?

What do those wasps look like?

I didn't know wasps got eggs, have never seen it myself, but then I learn something every day!

'Hope you get some eggs you can raise!

Sherry

I see several types of wasps on my fennel. Mostly I see them on the flowers. I have never actually seen a wasp eat an egg. That would be difficult to see. When I see several wasps on the plants I assume they are eating eggs. I don't see eggs after they leave. I would guess, however, that ants are more likely to eat the eggs and wasps the caterpillars.

I can't swear that they were eating eggs, but I've been out in the garden three days in a row and hadn't seen any activity on the fennel blossoms until then. Even earlier in the day, I remember thinking that fennel didn't seem to be very valuable as a nectar source. And these wasps were climbing over and under the umbell. They were also very small wasps, so seem more likely to prefer eggs to bigger cats. Obviously, I don't know exactly what was going on, but I didn't find any BST eggs.

incidentally, my husband thinks the fennel looks too weedy mixed in with the coneflowers. Does anyone have experience transplanting fennel? I'll Google it or start another thread.

Martha

Liz,

I missed your question. The wasps are smaller than honey bees, but have similar stripes on their bottom segment. I can tell they are wasps by the way their wings are shaped and positioned. Actually, they look like tiny yellow jackets.

Martha

Martha, I'm pretty sure that transplanting the fennel would be pretty much like transplanting most other plants. Soak the area around the roots before you remove the plant. Get as much of the root ball as possible and then put it where you want it to go. After that, make sure it gets enough water for the first week or so. You might add a very weak root stimulator to the water that you put over it. If I'm energetic I sprinkle and then water in some alfalfa pellets around new plants. The alfalfa is a weak, organic fertilizer that encourages growth of beneficial bacteria that the plants use to "digest" nutrients.

I'm sure you know that the butterflies don't mind "weedy." Also, if the fennel is growing into the cone flowers you will probably damage (but not kill) the root system of both in the transplanting process.

Tom, thanks for the suggestions. I'm not worried about the weediness, but my husband doesn't like it. And he puts up with a lot with my gardening. So, if I can move something to make him happy, I'm glad to. Also, I have plenty of coneflowers, so a little root damage is not going to change anything significantly. I'd love to have a dedicated patch of thick fennel. My sister's fennel spread in her garden and she gets BST cats every year.

Yes, it's nice to have a large patch that is allowed to grow. I have two such patches. For some reason I got very few on one patch this year, although it was more favored in past years. The other patch had 27 (that I counted) fully-or-almost fully-- grown caterpillars on it at one time a little over a week ago. Never had that many before. There were none on the two parsley plants right nearby and none on a smaller green fennel plant very close to it.

The cats disappeared slowly over a week's period. I'm thinking most of them made it to the chrysalis stage--although I only saw three or four chrysalises. I have a very messy garden, there are lots of places to hide.

Tom, Your garden sounds like a beautiful place to explore.