Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Lots of panic questions about Monarchs this year: in Auckland they are recorded as “pretty rare”, whereas in Christchurch I see them quite regularly and they’re doing fine in my garden. There are always some troubles with wasps. These predators are quite keen to chew the monarch caterpillars to pieces and take the protein back to the wasp nest as food for their larvae. It sounds awful and it looks awful; the common-German wasps (and Paper wasps) are, after all, imported pests that don’t belong here. Keep your plants with caterpillars under netting; the wasps can not access them. Another trick is to grow your swan plants in large pots, which can be moved to new sites when wasps discover the precious cargo; the wasp’s GPS system is disrupted when you change the position of the swan plants. Running out of food is often bad news – caterpillars starving Always keep an extra plant or two under curtain netting, so female monarchs can’t lay eggs on those spare food plants!! It also pays to reduce the number of eggs/