Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: raising a black swallowtail butterfly, 1 by kat7

kat7 wrote:
My 7 yr old daughter got really interested in caterpillars after raising and releasing monarch butterflies in her kindergarden class last year, so this year when I found a black swallowtail caterpillar on my black eyed susans, we decided to keep it and see if we could raise it to a butterfly. We only had the caterpillar for 24 hrs when I noticed it shedding its skin and actually got to watch it forming a crysalis. This weekend it hatched into a beautiful male black swallowtail, and we got to release it and watch it fly off in the backyard-what a really neat experience this was!!