Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Queen caterpillar, 1 by konkreteblond

konkreteblond wrote:
Oh my Cat, you are making this difficult! It's been a long time since I did my reading on butterflies and cats and I had no idea what a Soldier was! I finally found some pics on Bugguide and all are from FL. How would you tell the difference in the cats?! I can barely see a difference in the Queen and the Soldier.

Here is a pic of the Queen cats that I had last fall. It's not clear, but maybe you can get the idea. The darker part on them was blue. They had no red in their antennae either, all black. This is very interesting!

Those are great pics of the swallowtails. I never can remember which one is which, but yes, one has more yellow and one more blue. PiggyPoo, Cat is right, they "stink" you when they are scared or jostled. After a while mine got used to me and wouldn't, but when they did...Peeeee yuuuuu!

I have a few Queens and Monarch cats inside that I'll try to get a good look at today and some pics. I've got to do more research on this Soldier now.