Fun butterfly facts:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Probably the fastest butterflies are skippers and certain brush-footed butterflies. It has been estimated that these butterflies may be able to fly upwards of 50 km per hour. Most butterflies probably fly in the range of 8 to 20 km per hour. Butterflies, however, will often use the wind to increase their air speed. This is particularly true if they feel threatened by a predator. Butterflies that are found in open areas such as arctic and alpine tundra or grasslands are very good at using this technique. The Monarch is known to use fast winds, even the jet stream, to aid migration.

There are 750 species of butterflies in North America

Antarctica is the only continent on which no Lepidoptera have been found.

The fastest Lepidoptera are the sphinx moths. Some species have been clocked at 60 kph (37 mph). Many of these same moths are also capable of hovering in the air like a helicopter.

The organs used to taste food are not located on a butterflies head - they are located on the terminal segments of the leg (tarsi).

The irridescent colors found on the wings of many Lepidoptera are produced by bending light, not by pigmentation.

Adult butterflies feed on the nectar of flowers, but may also be seen feeding on rotting fruit, tree sap, fluids from animal carcasses, and mud puddles.

Monarch butterflies regularly migrate beween southern Canada and central Mexico, a total distance in excess of 2500 miles. They onlt weigh 1/50 of an ounce yet travel at 20 mph and reach altitudes of 10,000 feet.

"Puddle clubs" are groups of butterflies (usually males) that gather around mud puddles and other moist areas of soil to suck up salts and other minerals dissolved in water.