Image via Wikipedia

by Adam Fulford

Just like you drink through a straw, a butterfly drinks through its proboscis - which is like an in-built straw. A butterfly doesn’t have a visible, exterior mouth. So it cannot chew its food. Hence it must drink its food.

A caterpillar has a visible, exterior mouth and it chews on its food - the leaves. But once the caterpillar goes into its cocoon and emerges as a butterfly it loses its mouth and in its place is the proboscis - a long, tubular straw-like extension shaped like an antenna. When it’s not feeding, the proboscis is coiled inward.

Flowers position their pollen at their neck and at the tip of their petals. A butterfly searching for nectar first lands on the flower and tastes the nectar with its feet. Then it swings around and extends its proboscis down the tube to drink. The pollen sticks to the feet and the throat of the butterfly. When the same butterfly visits another flower, pollination takes place.

Flowers’ Passageway to Their Nectar

Butterflies with short proboscises chose plants with short passageways to their nectaries’, such as lantana, phlox and verbena flowers. Whereas, skippers and swallowtail butterflies stretch their long proboscises down the long tubes of Beardtongue flowers to sip nectar. (Even hummingbirds with their long beaks like the nectar of these flowers).

Flower Shape

Generally, butterflies prefer plants that have lots of flowers clustered in a flat-top. Firstly, this ensures a ’splash’ of color, drawing the butterfly to it. Secondly, with flat-topped cluster flowers, butterflies are assured of a good fill.

Petal Size

Butterflies like flowers with large petals — it’s easier to land on them. Which means, they do not have to hang precariously, flapping their wings (something the hummingbird does so energetically) to drink the nectar. And as mentioned above, this helps the flower too in pollination.

A number of flowers are just for butterflies. The nectar of such flowers is at the base of tubes that are too narrow for other bugs to use.

Some butterflies are attracted by plants of some colors and even seem to avoid plants of other colors. The Silver Spotted Skipper likes lots of colors — red, pink, blue, purple, white - but not yellow flowers. Sulphur Butterflies, on the other hand, prefer yellow flowers.

There are about 24, 000 species of butterflies. Every one of them is different in looks, tastes, colors, shapes. How many can you attract to your garden?

Tags: Butterflies, Butterfly Gardens, flowers, nectar, pollination, proboscis, Silver Spotted Skipper, Swallowtail butterfly, Wildlife