Butterflies

God's Warrior · Butterflies

Butterflies

Interesting Facts About Butterflies

In North America there are over 700 species of butterflies. Worldwide there are about 28,000 species of butterflies.

A caterpillar increases its body size thousands of times from hatching out of the egg to pupation.
As caterpillars grow they shed their skin.
Butterflies do not make cocoons. Butterflies develop from eggs to caterpillars, and during the pupal stage they harden into chrysalis. After a few weeks the adult butterfly will emerge from its chrysalis.
Butterflies range in size from 1/8 inch to almost 12 inches.

All butterflies have six legs and feet.

Butterflies taste their food through their feet not their proboscis (straw-like structure), which they use to drink nectar and juices.

Butterflies use their antennas to smell.

If their body temperature is less than 86 degrees butterflies cannot fly, so often butterflies absorb heat by basking in the sun.

Butterflies prefer flowers that are pink, yellow, red, or purple and have single petals.
After bees, butterflies are the second largest group of pollinators.

Butterfly Nectar Plants
This is a small list of favorite nectar plants that will bring enjoyment to both the gardener and the butterfly.
Butterfly Food

Asters
Bee Balm (Monarda)
Butterfly Bush (Buddleia)
Butterfly Weed Lavender
Candytuft Liastris
Coneflower (Echinacea) Rudbeckia
Coreopsis Sedum
Cosmos Sweet William
Dianthus Tithonia
Feverfew Violas
Joe Pye Weed Yarrow (Achillea)
Lavender Zinnia

You can always create your own butterfly garden using the plants from this plant list.

Grow A Butterfly Garden
If you grow flowers, you may think your landscape is automatically considered a "butterfly garden", but think again. Showy blossoms that we surround ourselves with are not necessarily a favorite on the butterfly menu.

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
~Hans Christian Anderson

Not All Frills, Simply Beautiful
Although butterflies are attracted to bold, beautiful colors they prefer flowers with a simple flare. Single petal flowers and native plants are at the top of their favorites. These plants usually contain higher amounts of nectar than most doubles, that may be hybridized for looks. Don't forget that along with nectar plants, host plants are extremely important if you want to enjoy the full butterfly experience.

Butterfly Garden Location
Since butterflies need to keep their body temperature warm, a sunny location is the ultimate spot. Most nectar plants & host plants will flourish if given at least 6 hours of sunlight. Other items that will entice butterflies to your butterfly garden are rocks to bask on and a butterfly puddle.

"Oh Sweet Nectar
Gives Me a Burst
Occasionally tho
I'm Dying Of Thirst"
~Unknown Butterfly

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."
~Hans Christian Anderson

Sip, Sip and Away
Unbeknownst to many, butterflies actually do sip other fluids besides nectar, for much needed moisture and minerals. Butterflies sip liquid foods using their straw-like proboscis, which uncoils to sip food, and coils up again into a spiral when not in use.

Puddling
Have you ever seen a cluster of butterflies on moist soil in your garden? This little event is called puddling. Most of the butterflies are probably males drawing up minerals from the soil. The small amounts of sodium in the soil give the male butterflies nutrients that enhance their libido.

Add a Puddle to Your Butterfly Garden
You can create your own butterfly puddle by digging a shallow dish into ground level, fill it with sand and moisten with water. Add rocks, crystals and marbles for a classy look and you can even add a sprinkle of salt if you want to entice the males.
MaryE

I've noticed that butterflies seen to like flowers that are rounded shapes like a Butterfly Bush, Sweet William and garden Phlox and they avoid cup shaped flowers. I think they can keep their wings from being injured on this rounded open shape but if they get into something like a day lily bloom they damage their wings. Somewhere I have a photo of a butterfly stuck in a daylily with major damage to his wings. After I took his picture I helped him out of the flower.

Websites about Butterflies

Butterflies of North America
http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/sitemap.htm

Monarch Watch
http://www.monarchwatch.org/

Mary
I'm always very happy to see the first butterflies, they say it's summer! Thanks for posting those links, I'm overdue for looking at butterflies.

Elena
Don't you just love them? I love going to butterfly houses. I sound like I have been to lots but really only to two. I have 5 butterfly bushes and I just love the way they stay around them all summer. I have a friend who has a sign on her car that says, "I brake for butterflies!" I love it. Wish I could find one for my car.

God's Warrior

We haven't come up with an answer, but I think what it is it's a book of hope. You little, ugly, little, insignificant bug: you, too, can grow up to be a beautiful, big butterfly and fly into the world, and unfold your talents.
Eric Carle

The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly.
Imogene Coca

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Joseph Conrad

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. R. Buckminster Fuller

Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly. Andre Gide

God's Warrior

It moves me when anybody is just wandering through life, sleepwalking, and then wakes up. It's like the caterpillar to butterfly thing - the chrysalis. It's just so moving because they're not going to go to their grave with a slipping down life.
Lili Taylor

I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar. Robert Wyatt

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Ernest Hemingway

And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another.
Herman Hesse

I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who's an expert on butterflies; who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space. Damien Hirst

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?
Chuang Tsu

God's Warrior

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. --Rabindranath Tagore

"Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it,
the more it will elude you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and softly sits on your shoulder".
Nathanial Hawthorne

They say that something as small as a butterfly beating its wings in China can cause a hurricane in America, so maybe we should go to China and kill all the butterflies, just to be safe.
--Ken Advent

Love is like a butterfly, hold it too tight, it'll crush, hold it too loose, it'll fly. --Unknown

A red brick Presbyterian church... captured by kudzu vines as surely as a butterfly in a net. Barbara Lazear Ascher

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly. Richard Bach

Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves. Drew Barrymore

You can chase a butterfly all over the field and never catch it. But if you sit quietly in the grass it will come and sit on your shoulder. --Unknown

They say that something as small as a butterfly beating its wings in China can cause a hurricane in America, so maybe we should go to China and kill all the butterflies, just to be safe. --Ken Advent

The butterfly is a flying flower, The flower a tethered butterfly. --Ecouchard Le Brun

"Love is like a butterfly, it goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes".

God's Warrior

"Butterflies are self propelled flowers". R. H. Heinlein

"A good book is as marvelous as a butterfly in flight".

"Flowers and butterflies drift in color: illuminating spring".

Cats, by means of their whiskers, seem to possess something like an additional sense: these have, perhaps, some analogy to the antennae of moths and butterflies.
--Rev. W. Bingley

If nothing ever changed, there'd be no butterflies.
--Unknown

I'll be floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.
Muhammad Ali