This beauty

It is always a thrill to spot the zebra longwing butterfly, especially since Hurricane Ian impacted our area in Sept. 2022. That devastating hurricane did quite a number on the state butterfly.

I have spotted the zebra longwing a few times in my garden in the past few years. Today, it caught my eye while in my mom’s garden, as she has quite a few mature fire bush planted, one of their favorite nectar plants.

There’s hope that this butterfly will once again find the garden, it’s host plant, corkystem passionvine, and start its lifecycle in our garden again.

Up to 50

 

am in awe with this butterfly, the polydamas swallowtail. In eight days, I have had 50 butterflies emerge, 20 today alone. I still have more chrysalsis to emerge!

There is truly nothing more special than having a butterfly sit on your hand before it decides to fly away, or juat hangs out with yiu for a while. They are spectacular.

They continue to emerge

Every day since late last week I have had polydamas swallowtail butterflies emerge from their chrysalsis in our butterfly house.

Yesterday I had 9 emerge and today I had 7 for a total of 187 all time raised and released, with 19 in six days. The wonderful part, there are more yet to show their beauty!

A 4th of July beauty

My influx of polydamas swallowtail caterpillars have almost all went into their chrysalis.

There are a few left still munching away on some Dutchman pipe, their host plant.

Today, on this glorious 4th of July, the first of probably dozens, has emerged.

This one marks 169 that we have successfully raised and released. Since it did not want to leave my finger, I left it on my purpletop vervain, which is doing incredibe with our daily down pours, so it can fly away when ready

Butterlfies appear  . . .

Butterflies appear when angels are near.

It never fails there is always a butterfly that emerges on a big day for my daughter. Today we had two.

Nature at its finest.

We had two butterflies emerge today, an orange barred sulphur (81) and a monarch butterfly (639).