 Butterflies pollinate wild plants and our crops, ensuring the production of seeds and fruits required for the continued survival of plants and animals, including humans.
 Due to their fragility to ecological change, butterflies are elegant indicators of ecosystem health.
 Butterflies are a valuable source of food for songbirds.
 Female butterflies usually are bigger and live longer than male butterflies.
 A butterfly has compound eyes: each eye is made up of about 6,000 tiny parts called lenses, which let in light.
 The Queen Alexandra’s birdwing from the island of New Guinea is the largest butterfly; it can have a wingspan of 11 inches!
 Most butterflies make no sound, but some in Florida and Texas make a loud clicking sound with their wings.
 Butterflies do not get bigger as they age - a young butterfly is a caterpillar!
 The female moth produces a scent that a male moth can smell a mile away.
 Butterflies are related to crabs and lobsters! Why? Because like those sea creatures, butterflies have skeletons on the outside of their bodies. They’re arthropods: insects,
crustaceans, millipedes, centipedes and arachnids.
 Butterflies weigh only as much as two rose petals, but can fly thousands of miles.
 Caterpillars are not worms. Caterpillars have legs; worms do not.
 Butterflies range in size from a tiny 1/8 inch to a huge almost 12 inches.
 Butterflies can see red, green, and yellow.
 Some people say that when the black bands on the Woolybear caterpillar are wide, a cold winter is coming.
 The top butterfly flight speed is 12 miles per hour. Some moths can fly 25 miles per hour!
 Monarch butterflies journey from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles, and return to the north again in the spring.
 Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees.
 Representations of butterflies are seen in Egyptian frescoes at Thebes, which are 3,500 years old.
 Antarctica is the only continent on which no Lepidoptera have been found.
 There are about 24,000 species of butterflies. The moths are even more numerous: about 140,000 species of them were counted all over the world.
 The Brimstone butterfly (Gonepterix rhamni) has the longest lifetime of the adult butterflies: 9-10 months.
 Some Case Moth caterpillars (Psychidae) build a case around themselves that they always carry with them. It is made of silk and pieces of plants or soil.
 The caterpillars of some Snout Moths (Pyralididae) live in or on water-plants.
 The females of some moth species lack wings, all they can do to move is crawl.
 The Morgan's Sphinx Moth from Madagascar has a proboscis (tube mouth) that is 12 to 14 inches long to get the nectar from the bottom of a 12 inch deep orchid discovered by Charles Darwin.
 Some moths never eat anything as adults because they don't have mouths. They must live on the energy they stored as caterpillars.
 Many butterflies can taste with their feet to find out whether the leaf they sit on is good to lay eggs on to be their caterpillars' food or not.
 There are more types of insects in one tropical rain forest tree than there are in the entire state of Vermont.
 In 1958 Entomologist W.G. Bruce published a list of Arthropod references in the Bible. The most frequently named bugs from the Bible are: Locust: 24, Moth: 11, Grasshopper: 10, Scorpion: 10, Caterpillar: 9, and Bee: 4.
 People eat insects – called "Entomophagy"(people eating bugs) – it has been practiced for centuries throughout Africa, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, and North, Central and South America. Why? Because many bugs are both protein-rich and good sources of vitamins, minerals and fats.
 You can eat bugs! Try the "Eat-A-Bug Cookbook" by David George Gordon , 10 Speed Press. Don’t want to cook them yourself? Go to HotLix for all sorts of insect goodies! My favorites are "Cricket-lickit’s" – a flavored sucker with a real edible cricket inside.
 Many insects can carry 50 times their own body weight. This would be like an adult person lifting two heavy cars full of people.
 There are over a million described species of insects. Some people estimate there are actually between 15 and 30 million species.
 Most insects are beneficial to people because they eat other insects, pollinate crops, are food for other animals, make products we use (like honey and silk) or have medical uses.
 Butterflies and insects have their skeletons on the outside of their bodies, called the exoskeleton. This protects the insect and keeps water inside their bodies so they don’t dry out.