Fun Facts
- The closed butterfly’s wings are brown, but when they open, you get a wonderful surprise – they look like a beautiful work of art with bright orange, black wing tips and white spots.
- When it’s a caterpillar, the Painted Lady is black with a yellowy stripe on each side and lots of soft spikes.
- When a caterpillar turns into a chrysalis, it makes a silky tent around itself, using a leaf. It takes one to two weeks to turn into a butterfly.
- The Painted Lady spends summer in Britain and, when it gets cold, it flutters to places as far away as North Africa and the Middle East. Seeing these butterflies migrate is a wonderful sight!
- You can find these butterflies almost everywhere, but they love thistles most of all. Look for thistles and you’ll probably find a Painted Lady!
Parent note: If you’d like to watch a caterpillar transform into a Painted Lady butterfly, we recommend the amazing butterfly garden from Insect Lore.
We recently sent out some butterfly gardens to some of our flutterbud friends, so they could learn about how caterpillars transform into chrysalides and then colourful Painted Lady butterflies. They had great fun! Find out how they got on here and here.
Why not see if you can spot some Painted Lady butterflies this week? To get started, how many butterflies can you count in this picture (don’t forget the bunting)? Happy Special Wonder spotting! With love and magic dust from the Magic Belles xxx
Butterflies Make Happy Skies
