Monarch Butterfly
Philadelphia Flower Show
Philadelphia PA
2015

Adult monarch butterflies possess two pairs of brilliant orange-red wings, featuring black veins and white spots along the edges. Males, who possess distinguishing black dots along the veins of their wings, are slightly bigger than females. Each adult butterfly lives only about four to five weeks.

Monarchs are large, beautifully colored butterflies that are easy to recognize by their striking orange, black, and white markings.

Monarch butterflies live in North, Central, and South America as well as Australia, some Pacific Islands, India, and Western Europe. Their markings include bright orange wings covered with black veins and rimmed with a black border and white dots. Females have thicker veins in their wings. A monarch's brilliant coloring tells predators: "Don't eat me. I'm poisonous." The butterflies get their toxins from a plant called milkweed, which is their only food source in the caterpillar stage. An animal that eats a monarch butterfly usually doesn't die, but it feels sick enough to avoid monarchs in the future.
The most amazing thing about monarch butterflies is the enormous migration that North American monarchs undertake each year. Every fall, as cold weather approaches, millions of these delicate insects leave their home range in Canada and the United States and begin flying south. They continue until they reach Southern California or central Mexico, nearly 2,500 miles away!
These international travelers return to the same forests each year, and some even find the same tree that their ancestors landed on. Some estimates say up to a billion butterflies arrive in the mountains of Mexico each year.


The Philadelphia Flower Show is an annual event produced by The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and traditionally held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in early March. It is the oldest and largest indoor flower show in the world, attracting more than 250,000 people annually.

Celebrate the Movies 2015 Theme
The 2015 PHS Philadelphia Flower Show opens to the public on Saturday, February 28th (and runs through March 8th) at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The Philadelphia Flower Show is the world’s oldest and largest indoor flower show and attracts more than a quarter of a million visitors each year.

The theme for the the 2015 Philadelphia Flower Show is “Celebrate the Movies”, with many of the stunning displays inspired by Disney and Pixar movies. Green Thumb, meet Silver Screen. In an addition to the overall show theme, there are many themed afternoon and evening events including ‘Wedding Wednesday’, ‘Girls Night Out’, ‘Cinderella Sunday’, and ‘Fido Friday’.

Along with the landscapes, there is a Butterfly exhibit to walk through with more than 1,000 rare butterflies.


Butterflies are insects that have large, often brightly colored wings, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprises the superfamilies Hedyloidea and Papilionoidea. Butterfly fossils date to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago.

Due to their bright colors and visits to flowers, butterflies are the most familiar of insects to humans. There are about 17,500 species of butterflies in the world, and around 750 species in the United States.

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/butterfly

https://butterflywebsite.com/