Behind my house I have a large forest where I found some pignut and mockernut hickory, Carya glabra and Carya tomentosa, respectively. I had many A. luna hatchlings; half were started on beech/birch, the other half on hickory. The beech gave off too much moisture and killed that half, but the hickory half thrived. I had eighty-four original larvae in the hickory half, but I’m down to forty-four, a much more manageable number. I’m currently rearing a very successful first brood on pignut hickory, and looking forward to the next one.
Identification: Hickory is fairly easy to identify. First, it has compound leaves. A simple leaf is a single leaf, while a compound leaf is a leaf made of many leaflets, which look just like leaves. The way to distinguish them is to look for a node. Nodes are areas of plants where stems or leaves emerge, and a leaf node is clearly visible on many trees. It is at one end of the petiole, also known as the leaf stalk. At the other end are the axis, (main artery of leaf) and the leaf itself. The node connects the leaf to the stem. The node is usually swollen slightly and the bottom almost wraps or hugs the stem. In some plants, the node is slightly darker or an otherwise different color than the petiole. Hickory nodes usually are a nice green, and almost spade-shaped. The leaflets are usually large, sometimes hairy beneath. Ash and hickory are very similar, but there are ways to tell them apart. First, hickories produce nuts, ashes produce winged seeds, so if you have a tree with hickory nuts on it, it’s a hickory, and always will be.
Ash and hickory both have compound leaves, so we must look at the leaflets. Typically, the terminal leaflet (the single leaflet at the end of the axis) is the largest leaflet in a hickory, while in an ash; the terminal leaflet is the same size or even a little smaller (green ash, Fraxinus pennsylvanica) than the axial leaflets (the paired leaflets along the sides of the axis), and sometimes the pair of axial leaflets closest to the terminal leaflet are larger as well in some hickory. Also, ash leaves are usually a lighter green than hickory, but this isn’t the rule of thumb. As for the individual hickory species, there are a few I will talk about here mainly; they are shagbark hickory, Carya ovata; pignut hickory, Carya glabra; and mockernut hickory, Carya tomentosa. Carya ovata is the easiest to identify, the shaggy bark is recognizable by nearly anyone, although some maple has shaggy bark, and a hickory leaf is easily distinguished by a maple leaf. Carya glabra has fairly small leaflets compared to the other hickories, and the leaves and twigs are hairless, and there is an almost sandpaper texture to the leaflets, additionally; pignut hickory almost always has 5 leaflets, occasionally 7 on some leaves but usually 5. Carya tomentosa has at least 7 leaflets, no more than 11, and these are wide and densely hairy beneath this hickory is like a big fat leafy trunk sticking out of the ground. The following link is a good hickory key I found online: http://www.cas.vanderbilt.edu/bioimages/tree-key/hickory-key.htm#2 Getting Hickory: Hickory can be a good hostplant to use for Actias luna, as well as any other hickory eating Saturniid. Pignut hickory is by far the most common hickory around, and is very commonly planted. If you are using hickory that is on someone else’s property, you should ask them for permission to use it, and explain you intend to use it to rear caterpillars, that way they don’t spray pesticides or other chemicals around your caterpillars’ food supply. I use hickory that is in the forest behind my house at the edge of someone’s backyard. They don’t mind me using it as long as I don’t take all of it, as they like to see the yellow leaves in the fall, and you have to respect other peoples’ property, so I now take from a hickory in between 2 peoples’ properties, this will save them some time in the fall because less leaves will need to be picked up. Once you find a hickory, be sure it can support a full brood. Large luna larvae eat a lot, so that one low branch on an otherwise tall, sparse hickory won’t cut it. If there are several trees around, that’s even better. The trunk should be at least 4 inches in diameter; this will be a good sized tree. The advantage of using forest trees is they probably won’t have chemicals on them, but they will have high branches because the low branches that don’t get sunlight die. You don’t want to strip a tree bare. If you find yourself using any more than about 45% of the total leaves during the brood, you probably picked too small a tree and may have just severely halted that tree’s growth for the next 2-3 years as it tries to replace what it lost. If there is a large tree with some small leaders growing from the root system, these may be convenient, low lying branches that the removal of won’t damage the tree. Try to use the lowest branches, these are easier to access and will be the least valuable to the tree, as these will be the first to be shed anyways, and since they’re older, they may be larger. Be careful trekking through the woods looking for hickory, especially if you are unfamiliar with the area. I myself go in the woods all the time and the area of the woods closest to my house all the way back to the cliff wall back in the woods 200 feet from my house are so familiar to me, I can navigate them in beach sandals. The only way to be more comfortable with an area is to continually explore it, keeping your house in sight at first then carefully progressing back more after a few weeks. My hickory supply is behind a house about 3 houses away from my own, so it is pretty easy to get to and I can just exit the woods and walk the road back home or go to the side of the neighbor’s fence, and follow it until I get to my backyard. The bottom line is to make sure you get hickory from a familiar location and ensure you don’t damage the trees. The same goes for any other hostplant. If you propagate or buy a hickory, it likely won’t be suitable for hostplant use for at least 5 years, so give it time and it will eventually reward you. As for getting the branches, go for what is in reach first. Long hedge clippers (about 15 inches long) can reach pretty far depending on your height and after the reachable with those branches are used, you can use poles and hooks to hold down branches for clipping and after that, large poles with clippers on the end work well. A 9 foot pole with a pulley and clipper system at the end is quite effective and makes a formidable weapon, so be careful. The last thing you want is to clobber yourself or someone else by merely swinging your body and holding the large pole. I don’t have the skills to hold and carry the pole upright, so I hold it along side me, parallel with the ground, by the middle of the pole for optimum balance. This pole is a great branch cutter and will serve me well for years to come, but only use it when necessary, and try not to let too many people see you carrying around a giant plant clipper pole, the last thing you want is for your neighbors to think you’ve gone insane and are using this pole to break into homes and hurt people when you’re really just trying to feed some caterpillars.
Using Hickory: I’ve heard that hickory wilts when cut very easily, so always cut sections that have some wood to them, this makes them last longer. If you use a rearing sleeve, you don’t have to worry about that, but I can’t use a rearing sleeve since my hickory supply is on someone else’s property. I use a 5 gallon bucket with a mesh top and the hickory is in a juice bottle full of water. I clog up the opening of the bottle because luna larvae are wanderers, and often crawl in and drown if you aren’t careful. You’d be surprised at how much hickory I can stuff in a bucket, and doing that forces the larvae to eat to make room for themselves, so they eat quite effectively. Pignut hickory doesn’t wilt as easily as the other hickory, it can last up to 3 days before drying out, but with 44 hungry larvae, it lasts only 1 day. I usually cut off a large branch and cut it into smaller sections to fit in the bucket, the wood of pignut hickory isn’t too flexible, but I find my luna larvae love it. There isn’t much else to say about using hickory, other than during periods of extreme heat be extra diligent about providing fresh food and be sure to include some wood on cut stems for longer lasting leaves. Pros and Cons of Pignut Hickory:
Pros:
Doesn’t wilt as easily as other hickory
Common and easy to obtain
Very good hostplant for Actias luna
Cons:
Wood isn’t very flexible
This hickory often houses multiple species, so you may see other caterpillars, spiders, earwigs and other insects more often than with other plants, so you must be
vigilant to prevent carnage
Conclusion: Pignut hickory is a very valuable hostplant in the world of Saturniidae, and is relatively trouble free. For most, the benefits outweigh the risks. and I recommend it be used by anyone wishing to rear Actias.
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