Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.

Butterflies to see and links to share for Pollinator Week

It’s said that birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small mammal pollinators are responsible for one out of every three bites of our food. Pollinating flowers is a serious job. For this reason, the Pollinator Partnership organization created an event called Pollinator Week, every year around the third week of June.

In 2019, it’s June 17– 23. The blog post for this year is Creating Lawn Habitat for Endangered Bumblebees, which includes two citizen-science initiatives that you can contribute to by sending in your bumblebee sightings.

In 2017 (the year of this post), it’s June 19-25.

In 2013, I blogged about it with a bonus DIY Mason Bee house project.

It’s very important to give honeybees and native insect pollinators as much habitat and food as we possibly can, because of Colony Collapse Disorder. In absence of remedies to prevent this disease from killing the honey bees that pollinate our non-native food crops, only natural resistance, the kind where survivors (in particular, survivor queens) go on to create new hives, will improve the survival rates of beehives. In addition, honey bees are very competitive with native pollinator species, so we need to make sure that the natives get a fair crack at food sources – specifically native plants, which honey bees are less adept at pollinating.

So, to inspire people to do something to appreciate or even help our pollinators, I found a few links to share. Nature herself also motivated me: the cover photo for this post came from my recent trip to the Adirondacks, where I found a bunch of Eastern Swallowtail butterflies mud-puddling on the beach.

Why do butterflies mud-puddle? Well, it’s an easy way to absorb minerals, sodium in particular, from the solution it makes in water-logged soil. For this reason, other insects also congregate around mud puddles.

What more can we lawn-owners and gardeners do to help bees and other insect pollinators, such as butterflies?

  • Make your Garden a Sanctuary for Bees – this article is an old favourite (2014).
  • The Canadian Wildlife Federation has a few handouts with in-depth information on creating food and habitat for pollinators in your garden. (Look for a “Poster and Handout” kind of link in your search there, they have moved the resource in question). This is the page for butterflies. You’ll find a library of information on biodiversity and all the campaigns that the CWF supports. They are my go-to place for information related to wildlife gardening, and for making our towns and cities welcoming to nature again.

I have a puzzle for you:

While I was watching the Eastern Swallowtails (27 of them!) at the beach, I saw a Red Admiral butterfly also mud-puddling. (Here is an Instagram photo (follow me!) of one that was sunning itself in the backyard last week.) Another butterfly also was there, on the beach, and I’m going to give you the photograph below, and turn on the comments for this post.

Q: Can you tell me what butterfly this is?
How can you tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth?

Mourning cloak butterfly
Specie is in the comments!

Want to identify other butterflies you’ve seen? Try this handy key!

A gift for pollinators, and newsletter subscribers:

Milkweed is a perennial plant that many insects rely on for food and shelter, such as the now-endangered Monarch butterfly. If you’d like to receive a packet of milkweed seeds, sign up to my list (the newsletter will begin when I attain a certain threshold of subscribers). Reply to your list confirmation email with your address, and I will send you a packet. You can plant them this year or next.

4 Comments

  1. M.A. Bell

    Butterflies have smooth antennae and moths have fern-like antennae.

  2. M.A. Bell

    And that’s a Mourning Cloak butterfly.
    See more here: http://redandthepeanut.blogspot.ca/2012/09/a-mourning-cloak-butterfly-sips-sap.html

    • Jane Sorensen

      That’s a lovely blog post about the Mourning Cloak Butterfly! Thank you for finding and posting it!

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