The hubby and I stumbled into the hobby of raising butterflies a few years ago. I bought a bunch of herbs for a kitchen garden and started finding all these caterpillars on my parsley and fennel plants. They were destroying the plants, but were so pretty that I didn't have the heart to kill them. Instead we brought them inside and kept them in one of those clear critter habitat things.
I tried feeding them all sorts of plants, but they would only eat the parsley, fennel, or carrot tops. I did an internet search and found that these were also known as 'parsley worms' and that they are the larvae of the Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly. They only eat plants in a certain family which includes parsley, fennel, carrots, and a few other things so they get a hard time from gardeners who don't want to share their crops.
We raised a couple dozen from itty bitty caterpillers all the way to butterflies that first year alone and released them into our garden. The butterflies are large and mostly black with lots of blue and yellow and their wings have tails on the bottom tips. In the years since then we have made sure to plant plenty of extra parsley and fennel plants in our landscaping to give the butterflies plenty of room to lay eggs and still give us enough parsley to eat.
This is the first spring we have not raised any, since we moved to our new place. We planted an herb bed with lots of parsley and fennel, but the butterflies have not found it yet.
