An Upside Down Butterfly

Our beautiful sourwood trees (named for the sour oxalic acid in the leaves) are in bloom and they have a myriad of tiny white bell-shaped flowers that hang down. If these flowers remind you of blueberries, you are correct since both are in the heath family. Sourwood is generally pollinated by bees which are attracted to the very sweet nectar, which is made into one of the world’s premium honeys by European honeybees.

In our yard I noticed that the red spotted purple butterflies figured out a way to share in the rich nectar supplied by these tiny white flowers. They hang upside down, which is an awkward position for them, but it seems to work. So a behavioral trick allows these “upsy daisy” butterflies to steal some nectar meant for bees. It shows how the co-evolution of flowers and their designated insect pollinators can be disrupted by a trick. It also illustrates that butterflies are capable of learning how to extract nectar from a variety of flowers for which their body structure is not well adapted.