This year I decided to build a raised planter so me and my 4 year old daughter could have a go at growing a small amount of food to teach her how things are grown etc. We decided to go for broccoli and strawberries as they're 2 of her favourite foods and they were reasonable to grow in the space we had. The broccoli's in particular really took off and we've had some great produce from them, it's been great being able to chop a bit off the plant, put it in the pan and have it for our tea within half an hour. We kept noticing patches of yellow spots on the leaves, so we googled it and it turned out to be butterfly eggs from the White Cabbage butterfly. A few hatched and we ended up with quite a few caterpillars; I wasn't particularly keen on them ruining the broccoli but I also didn't want to kill them and my daughter said they have been growing butterflies at nursery. I went on Amazon and bought a butterfly house (basically a pop up net with a zipped door) so we chopped all the leaves off that we could see had eggs on and picked the already hatched caterpillars up and put them all the in their new home. We've been feeding them fresh leaves and there's bloody hundreds of them hatching in this thing.* Anyway, none of the caterpillars had pupated yet and cocooned themselves but we have noticed a patch of yellow larger egg things at the top of the net. So I've just spent my lunch break Googling what they could be and it turned out they are parasitic wasp eggs. The adult wasp injects its' eggs into a live caterpillar, then the larvae grow and work their way out of it. The host caterpillar wraps them up in a silk-like cocoon and watches over them for a few days until it dies off. So I've gone from growing a few broccoli for my 4 years olds tea, to breeding caterpillars/butterflied and now I'm a wasp breeder!! I don't know if anyone is interested but I found it fascinating. If you are interested, there's a few videos on YouTube including this one: * I have now unzipped the house and put it next to where we planted the broccoli. I felt there were too many of them in there and it didn't seem fair on them in the end with the amount of ***** they produce etc. My broccoli's have done their job for this year so it's time to let the caterpillars go loose on them. Hopefully we will get some butterflies out of them still, that's if the birds don't get there first.
Parasitic wasps inspired the Alien screenplay so you could complete her education by watching the 1979 slasher sci-fi with her. Great Dad skills BTW.
