Nelson’s butterfly facts:People think that butterflies don’t move around. They fly high sometimes and storms and winds will blow them enormous distances. A butterfly not like a bee. A bee burrows down and gets it all over its body, leaves some. Butterflies are not great pollinators by any means. They are also neutral. They don’t do a lot of damage to anything. You will notice where you see a number of them flying one year, make sure you come back there the following year because there will probably be an outbreak of them. And they will be everywhere you look. Butterflies to begin with don’t just eat anything. Each species of butterfly has particular things that its larvae will heat and it won’t eat other things. If they can’t lay an egg on that plant, nothing will happen. They are dependent on that plant’s existence. If you get rid of the plants, you get rid of the bugs. They estimate three days for the average butterfly. Between birds and spiders and the fronts of cars, their estimate is three days. They like railroad tracks. You’ve got gravel there which the sun warms up and so there’s a source of warmth which butterflies like. It’s a free and clear highway for butterflies. And they use it. They go up and down. And it’s a good highway because they don’t get hit by cars. Generally speaking, in the morning they will get out and they will usually start to be active as the dew disappears. When it begins to dry out, sunny, especially if there’s no wind, they start moving around a bit. And the next thing you’ll notice is that they’re visiting flowers and nectaring. Later on in the morning they’ll start visiting mud puddles. They will stick their tube down in and suck the sand or the mud. And they’re after minerals. As far as we know, they see ultraviolet and a lot of flowers give
off ultraviolet light. |