Doesn’t it make your heart sing when you see a monarch butterfly float into your garden, pause to reach deep into the heart of a marigold and continue on its way?
But butterflies do more than add colour and charm to your garden. When they reach deep into a flower to sup at the nectar, they pick up pollen which they transfer to other flowers. Bingo! Pollination has occurred. Soon there will be more fruit, or seeds, on the way.
Most plants need pollinators like bees and butterflies to create seed. It is said that one in every three mouthfuls of the food we eat is the result of insect pollination. apples, figs, strawberries, seeds such as beans and sunflowers, cucumbers, pumpkins… the list goes on.
Butterflies are a wonderful complement to) was introduced by mistake, evidently as a stowaway on a shipment of vegetables in 1929. Efforts to reduce its numbers have not been successful – in fact, the deliberate introduction of a parasitic wasp to help control it has been unsuccessful and had devastating effects on our own New Zealand butterflies.
