Large White Butterfly (Pieris Brassicae)

Most gardeners call them “Cabbage Whites” Because of the devastation they do to crops if not protected. I know one old chap who scrapes off the eggs from his cabbages with a knife. A female in its lifetime can lay upto 600 eggs.

For my photography I brought some cabbages, planted some in my garden and also in pots and positioned them on my patio, during the summer there many female butterflies flying around our feet, to lay there eggs. I left the eggs and caterpillars to get on with it, although some had been attacked by parasitic Ichneumon Flies, (Apanteles Glomeratus) which inject eggs inside the larvae, as some when full grown were covered in the yellow cocoons that the parasitic larvae had spun after eaten the caterpillars alive, But plenty did survive, and the full gown caterpillars were walking around my garden, climbing into my garage, walking up my house wall and shed to make there pupae. I photographed one on my shed door just after it had emerged, the pupae is attached by a silk girdle. There are two to three generations a year, the last being the pupae that hibernates through the winter.

Large White Butterfly larvae resting on a cabbage leaf.

Large White Butterfly eggs laid on cabbages.