Tag Archives: Butterfly Estates

In love

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My daughter and I went back to The Butterfly Estates in Downtown Fort Myers this morning and again became lost in the beauty surrounding us.

The Florida Native Butterfly Society, which is a nonprofit organization, helps in protecting and preserving these beautiful inspects. Every now and again they will share that they have an abundance of butterfly eggs to share for a small donation. Yesterday that announcement came for the Julia butterfly and today we were there picking up our eggs to raise at home. We asked for 10, as my friend wants to raise some too, and they provided many more to make sure we did end up with 10 Julia butterflies.

The host plant is that of the passion-vine family, which we have a plentiful supply. The hope is we can bring some to the garden after raising some in our butterfly house. The eggs are yellow and the caterpillars are brown with white spots and black spines. I am excited to watch the life cycle.

According to Florida Wildflower Foundation it is known as the Julia heliconian and Flambeau, the flame and belong to the brush-footed family. Their wingspan can range up to 9.2 cm.

Just like the zebra longwing, they too visit a food source repeatedly along a set route. They are year round visitors in Southern Florida.

As we strolled through the butterfly house this morning there were tons of Julia butterflies mating, sipping on nectar, resting and flying about. It was a beautiful sea of orange every where you looked. The female is duller in color with more black markings, while the male is brighter orange with narrow black borders.

The Great Southern White

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I love this butterfly because of the turquoise colored antennal clubs. This butterfly was not easy to photograph at first, but then decided to hang out on a leaf closer to me.

I have read that this butterfly is sort of easy to identify the male and female. The males are whiter in color, while the female appears more of a dirty white to gray. There are also other identifiers in the forewing and ventral hindwing. The male has a black forewing apex and a ventral hindwing white-yellow appearance. The female has a black forewing apex and forewing cell spot and the ventral hindwing is gray.

The wingspan of the great southern white is 45 to 58 mm. Their flight season is year round in such areas as South Texas, peninsular Florida, as well as the Gulf Coast. They enjoy habitats in salt marshes, beaches, roadsides and disturbed areas.

According to the Florida Museum its host plant is the Virginia pepper grass, saltwort, limber caper and sea rocket. I also read that the caterpillar also hosts on plants from the mustard family. The egg is yellow and are either laid single, or in clusters. The caterpillar has a gray body with both yellow and orange longitudinal bands. The caterpillars body also has black dot tubercles with sparse long hairs. If that was not colorful enough, it also has a yellow orange head with speckled black dots.

Eye catching

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The malachite butterfly absolutely stole the show today while visiting the Butterfly Estates in the Downtown Fort Myers River District. My friend and I were in complete awe and could not get enough of this graceful flyer with the stunning green coloring.

This is the one that my friend and I continue to talk about hours later. The one that has left us researching the host plant, so we can add it to our garden. That’s part of the great fun of creating a butterfly garden, at least for me, seeing how many species you can attract to your space. How many you can invite in, so you can admire their beauty and watch their life cycle. I believe we are up to 10 different species!

I only took 67 photos of this beauty.

According to the University of Florida, the Malachite, Siproeta stelenes, is named after the semi-precious green gemstone. Although the number of this butterfly has declined, they have been found in Lee County, an area of Southwest Florida, among a few other counties in Florida.

The eggs are green and the caterpillars are black with red markings and are horned and spiny. Its host plant is the green shrimp plant, which is also called Browne’s Blechum. The native wildflower choice, according to the University of Florida, is the Carolina wild petunia.