Painted Lady, Vanessa cardui

I have only seen a Painted Lady laying an egg on three occasions. The first time was on a Creeping Thistle in a horse field, so I picked the thistle leaf and decided to raise the caterpillar on a thistle at home in my garden. Sadly a few days after hatching we had torrential rain and I never saw the caterpillar after that.

Two years ago I saw a Painted Lady lay and egg on a Woodland Groundsel plant in my woods. I marked the plant and kept an eye on it, but two days later we had torrential rain again and the egg disappeared. I searched the ground around the leaf it had been on, but couldn’t find the egg.

This June, when I was up in East Lothian I watched a Painted Lady as it laid several eggs on a Spear Thistle at the side of a path. I decided to pick one flower head and try raising the butterfly in the safety of a cage at home. The picture below was taken on my work phone. The others were all taken on my Samsung phone, so not the best of quality, but they give an idea of the different stages.

Seven days later, on the 6^th July, I noticed that the egg had hatched, but despite searching the flower head for ages, I couldn’t find a caterpillar anywhere. 

Three days later I found it at the base of the flower. At this stage it was dark brown with three rows of three yellow spines.

I picked a stem of Creeping Thistle and put it in a jar of water with a hole in the lid, but the caterpillar didn’t seem to like this, so I tried a much less palatable-looking Spear thistle and it happy ate that!

I then realised that I had two caterpillars, so there must have been another egg on the flower. Unfortunately, though I wasn’t thorough enough checking the leaves and I discovered that I had introduced a Flower Bug into the cage, which devoured one of the caterpillars. I didn’t know anything about these creatures, so I looked it up and discovered that they area a “gardener’s friend”, as they kill aphids and caterpillars by piercing their skin and sucking out the contents!

The remaining caterpillar munched its way through several leaves, but didn’t seem to have as much of an appetite as the Red Admirals or Peacocks I was rearing at the time.

After going through various very attractive instars the caterpillar left the thistle on the 25^th of July and made its way up to the top of the cage, where it spun a silk pad and hung in a J-shape for a couple of days.

Two days later it had formed a beautiful chrysalis.

It only remained as a chrysalis for 12 days and it emerged as a butterfly on the 8^th August.

Once it had dried its wings I took it outside into the afternoon sun. Almost immediately it took off and flew across the orchard never to be seen again!

I checked my Buddleia plants daily and it wasn’t until the 5^th of September that I saw another Painted Lady. I had quite a few regularly feeding until late September when the weather started to cool down.