What insects are on the zinnias this week?
This little assassin bug nymph has orange spots that match the flower heads.
I doubt this Geron bee fly is fooled.
Getting outdoors is a great way to celebrate Earth Day.
Are you doing anything special for Earth Day today?
For our regular STEM Friday feature we recommend two books about trees for children, just in time for Arbor Day, next Friday April 24, 2015. (Read the rest of the reviews and see a video book trailer at Wrapped in Foil blog.) Then we’ll finish out Butterfly Gardening With Children Week with a discussion of trees for butterfly gardens.
The first book, Branching Out: How Trees Are Part of Our World
The second book, Celebritrees: Historic and Famous Trees of the World
Appropriate for butterfly gardening week:Â In the section about oak trees in the back matter of this book, we find out that a single large oak tree can support up to 34 species of butterflies!
That fact reminds us that although growing pretty flowers helps the adult butterflies, to have a truly productive butterfly garden you need to supply food for caterpillars as well.
Many beautiful species of butterflies require trees as larval hosts.
Examples:
1. Hackberry trees (Celtis species) are larval food for
The snout butterfly
Hackberry emperor butterfly (Public domain photograph by Megan McCarty)
(Seed of the Week post about Canyon Hackberry)
2. Live oaks are larval food for California sister butterfly larvae.
California sister butterfly, Ramsey Canyon, Arizona
Some duskywings and hairstreaks also use oaks for food.
3. Black cherry (Prunus serotina) trees are larval food for:
4. Citrus trees (orange, lemon grapefruit) attract numerous giant swallowtails. Their larvae are called orange dog caterpillars.
An orange dog caterpillar on a grapefruit leaf
In addition to larval food, trees provide shelter for butterflies (and a multitude of other animals), provide safe places for the caterpillars to pupate, and some flowering trees supply nectar for many more adult butterflies.
In his book, Bringing Nature Home, entomologist Doug Tallamy gives a list of how many species of butterflies and moths are supported by 21 kinds of trees. The numbers are astonishing! He says oak trees (genus Quercus) provide food for some 534 different species of butterflies and moths. Given that those butterflies are important pollinators and parts of the food web, that is an enormous contribution.
Activity:
If you are going to plant a tree for Arbor Day or any other event, consider choosing a local species that will host butterflies. You will get yet another benefit from a tree. Please leave a comment if you have any questions about how to choose a suitable butterfly host tree for your area.
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Wrap-ups:
 This is the final post for Butterfly Gardening with Children Week. Hope you enjoyed it. If you missed the previous posts from the week, check our links page for topics we covered.
Interested in reading more great books about trees for Arbor Day? Try our giant, redwood-sized list of children’s books about trees at Science Books for Kids.
Disclosures: The books above were from my local library. Also, I am an affiliate for Amazon. If you click through the linked titles or ads and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission at no extra charge to you. Proceeds will be used to maintain this self-hosted blog.
Come visit the STEM Friday blog each week to find more great Science, Technology, Engineering and Math books.
Bees get all the buzz whenever someone brings up pollination, but butterflies deserve some credit, too. In fact, there are some flowers that are pollinated specifically by butterflies.
Background:
What is pollination? Remember visiting flower parts a few weeks ago? Let’s look at the generalized diagram again:
(“Mature flower diagram†by Mariana Ruiz LadyofHats. Public Domain image at Wikimedia Commons.)
Pollination is simply the movement of the pollen made in the anthers (pollen shown as orange balls in this diagram on the right) to the top of the female part of the flower, called the stigma. Sometimes the physical distance between the two seems quite small, but many, many plants need the assistance of animal pollinators to achieve pollination.
Take the red bird of paradise flowers. The long, red threadlike structures are the anthers on very long filaments.
What pollinates such an odd flower? It turns out that when swallowtail butterflies drink the nectar of these flowers, they get pollen all over their wings. When they drink at another red bird of paradise flower, they pollinate it.
Other flowers pollinated by butterflies include phlox, many of the flat-topped flower heads in the daisy family (asters, zinnias, etc.), and the milkweeds.
Butterflies are attracted to flowers so they can feed on nectar.
Butterflies use their proboscis (mouthparts) rather like a straw when they drink nectar. Can you see this queen butterfly’s proboscis probing the milkweed flower?
1. Nectar Cups for Young Children
Let young children pretend they are butterflies and make nectar cups for them to drink from.
Gather:
1. Have the children cut flower shapes from the construction paper. For very young children, adults may need to help draw the flower shapes using stencils and to help cutting out thicker posterboard.
2. Use a sharpened pencil to poke a hole in the center of the flower large enough to accommodate the straw.
3. Fill the cup with the drink (“nectar”). Cap the cup and then put the straw through the paper flower center and into the cap of the cup. Allow the flower to rest on the cap, so the children can drink the “nectar” from the “flower.”
2. Investigate Pollination in the Butterfly Garden
Surprisingly little is known about butterflies and pollination. Older children may want to investigate butterfly pollination in their butterfly gardens.
Go out to the garden at the same time every day for at least once a day and count how many butterflies you see on a few different types of flowers over a given amount of time, say 15 minutes. Record the species you see with a camera. Graph your results and figure out which species of butterflies prefer which types of flowers.
(You might want to see a similar study for bees for ideas).
Be sure to check our growing list of links to information about butterfly gardening with children.
For more information, see Roberta Gibson Writes.
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