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Happenings in the insect world
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by Karen Truax
on July 22, 2024 at 12:19 PM
7-22-2024. My husband, John, just came into the house after watering our gardens to tell me he has discovered hundreds of caterpillars on our San Diego, California redbud tree. They are munching on the leaves. We are huge advocates of insect and promoter of the monarch butterflies. Our gardens contain many milkweeds and the monarchs dine on the nectar of the blooms and lay their eggs. We have watched many entire life cycles of monarchs and feel glad to do our part to save them. We looked up these caterpillars on our redbud tree, believing they must be of some beautiful and exotic butterfly. Instead, we have discovered they are the redhumped caterpillar; soon to become moths. We are not ones to ever murder any of our delightful bugs, spiders, bees or wasps. In fact, we covered a green lynx spider web with her and her egg with a card table and plastic sheeting during a rain storm to protect them. The green lynx was a hitchhiker on a plant we had purchased at our nursery. Our current dilemma. As responsible environmentalists and conservationist at heart, we are uncertain what to do with our population of redhumped caterpillars on the redbud tree. If they are not harmful to the neighborhood and will not kill our tree, we would be glad to watch their process of development transpire. If it is only a matter of them eating the leaves, but not harming our tree we can accept that. If they wreak havoc on the environment and run the risk of over producing and bringing about a plague of them, then we would like to know who you suggest we contact to have them safely removed, not slaughtered, and even relocated elsewhere. We are not the sort of people who will use pesticides to kill any of these critters. If someone in San Diego, familiar with this species and situation could advise us as to what we should do, we would appreciate it. Thank you.
 
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