Date: 08/01/2016

Number: 1

a single female continues to lay eggs on my incarnata but the eggs disappear one after the next. she's come to this plant since July 23 about 4 times in total and I can visually see her curl her tail underneath a leaf and deposit an egg, about 5-6 every visit from what it looks like. Though I haven't seen a single egg hatch and they all disappear very quickly (within two days or so). I'm concerned that a wasp is taking them all, since I also have ZERO black swallowtail cats on my carrot tops and parsleys in my veg garden, when normally at this time I'd have twenty to thirty in all stages of development. Last year I had 15 monarch cat eggs that reached butterfly stage from eggs laid on my tuberosa plants and double that number of the black swallowtails. The other day I witnessed a brown-colored wasp feeding on a small swallowtail cat that it apparently found on one of my carrot tops. I'm thinking these wasps may have decimated this year's cats completely! Though I prefer natural predators to sprays in my organic vegetable garden, I'm in a quandary over whether to catch and kill these wasps which, come to think of it, I've actually never noticed before this season.

Broomall, PA

Latitude: 40 Longitude: -75.3

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