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Fun Facts

• Butterflies range in size from the blue pygmy at just over half an inch to New Guinea's Queen Qlexandra's birdwing, which can measure up to a foot.
• Butterflies can see red, green, and yellow.
• Some people say that when the black bands on the Woolybear caterpillar are wide, a cold winter is coming.
• The top butterfly flight speed is 12 miles per hour. Some moths can fly 25 miles per hour!
• Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles, and return to the north again in the spring.
• Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees.
• There are about 24,000 species of butterflies. The moths are even more numerous: about 140,000 species of them were counted all over the world.

The Life of the Butterfly

Butterflies belong to the insect order Lepidoptera. The word "Lepidoptera" is derived from a Greek word meaning "scale wing." The butterfly wing scales create the wonderful colors and patterns observed in butterfly wings. There are 165,000 species of Lepidoptera worldwide, but of those, only about 24,000 are butterflies!

Butterflies range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch to a huge almost 12 inches. Most adult butterflies only live one or two weeks. Adult butterflies use flower nectar as a food source. To obtain nectar, a butterfly's mouth (proboscis) is a long tube it keeps rolled up until ready for use, and is then used as a straw. Butterflies can see red, green, and yellow.

The transformation of the frequently ugly or bizarre caterpillar into an elegant butterfly - is truly one of the regularly performed miracles of Nature. All butterflies have "complete metamorphosis." To grow into an adult they go through 4 stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. Each stage has a different goal - for instance, caterpillars need to eat a lot, and adults need to reproduce. Because the caterpillar and adult eat different kinds of food, this helps the butterflies to better survive. Depending on the species, the life cycle of a butterfly (one generation) may take anywhere from about one month to an entire year.