8 June: Dragonflies

The second Saturday in June is National Dragonfly Day. Ten things you might not know about dragonflies:

1. Dragonflies belong to the infraorder Anisoptera below the order Odonata.

2. The name of the infraorder comes from the Greek words for "unequal" and "wing" because dragonflies' hindwings are broader than their forewings. The order Odonta includes damselflies and is so named because members of the order have serrated teeth. There are more than 5,000 known species of dragonflies.

3. Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years; they were among Earth’s first insects. Fossils have been found of dragonflies with wingspans of up to two feet. They’re a bit smaller now, with most falling in the range of two to five inches.

4. Their lifespan is long in insect terms. They can live up to 6.5 years in the wild although most of this time is spent in the larval stage. Adult dragonflies live for only a few weeks or up to a year.

5. They are skilled and agile fliers and catch their prey on the wing. In fact, that’s the only way they can eat so if a dragonfly can’t fly it would starve. Dragonflies can judge the speed and trajectory of a target and adjust their flight accordingly. They're so skilled they have up to a 97% success rate when hunting. When they catch something they hold it in their Feet and tear off its wings using its teeth before eating it, all without needing to land.

6. Dragonflies can fly in any direction, including sideways and backwards, and can hover in a single spot for more than a minute. They're fast, too, with some species reaching a top speed of 18 mph. There’s one species, as well, which can fly incredible distances. The globe skimmer flies 11,000 miles over the sea in what's considered to be the world's longest insect migration.

7. Their heads are mostly Eyes. Their eyes are huge and are made up of 30,000 facets. This gives them nearly 360-degree vision, with just one blind spot directly behind them.

8. Many dragonflies, particularly males, are territorial. They’ll defend a territory against other dragonflies. They might be defending a perch which gives them a good view over an insect-rich feeding ground, or for access to females.

9. A single dragonfly can eat hundreds of Mosquitoes per day.

10. In folklore, for the Navajo, dragonflies symbolise pure Water, while in Japan, they are associated with the season of Autumn and are symbols of rebirth, courage, strength, and happiness.

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The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.

Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.

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24 September: World Wasp Day

Today is World Wasp Day Here are 10 things you might not know about wasps:

1. There are 30,000 identified species of wasps. There are about 9,000 different species in the UK alone. Of these, only nine live in nests. The rest are solitary. Nor are wasps always Black and Yellow. They come in a variety of different colours.

2. They belong to the insect sub-order Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera. Black and yellow wasps (yellowjackets) and hornets are in the family Vespidae.

3. The largest wasp is the Asian giant hornet, which can grow to to 5 centimetres (2.0 in) in length. The smallest is the fairy wasp which is just a millimeter long and is therefore not only the smallest wasp but the smallest insect known to science.

4. People often ask, what is the point of wasps? All they seem to do is gatecrash picnics. Well, they are important pollinators, even though they’re slightly less good at it than Bees. They can be quite specialist: almost every one of the 1000 species of tropical Fig trees has its own specific fig wasp (Chalcidoidea) that has co-evolved with it and pollinates it. Some wasps prey on pests such as aphids. In fact, nearly every pest on Earth is preyed upon by a species of wasp, even clothes moths. They’re also scavengers, munching on dead insects and collecting them to feed their larvae. So they do have a useful function.

5. Worker wasps feed protein rich food to the larvae and in turn the larvae produce sugars and carbohydrates to feed the workers. It’s when the larvae have all matured that the workers have to go looking for sugary food elsewhere, around late August. Their natural choice would be rotting fruit, but human picnics are a handy source of sugars as well.

6. Only female social wasps sting, and only in self defence. The stingers are actually a modified egg-laying organ. Solitary wasps use their stingers and venom for hunting.

7. Wasp sting venom has a “smell” which can be detected by other wasps, and this is left behind when a wasp stings a person, effectively marking that person as a threat, and making other wasps more aggressive towards them.

8. Wasps can recognise each other by their unique facial patterns.

9. Wasps first appeared in the fossil record in the Jurassic, and diversified into many surviving superfamilies by the Cretaceous.

10. An irrational fear of wasps is called spheksophobia.

Character Birthday

Jade and Gloria Johannesjaegervitch, twin daughters of King Christopher III and Queen Helena of Galorvia. When a rebellion threatened to overthrow the monarchy, the King arranged for the twin princesses to be smuggled out of the country by his old university friend, Ildas McNair. The King and Queen were killed in the rebellion and McNair ended up bringing up the girls with the help of his housekeeper. Throughout their childhood and young adulthood, the girls were in constant danger of being assassinated by republicans wishing to wipe out the royals for good. This meant that they lived incognito and moved around frequently to avoid threats. The Galorvian royals are genetic variants and have the ability to fly, shoot zap bolts, and with any other member of the family, create a forcefield. The twins were no exception. Their powers were discovered by the Chain Gang, when Jade, the eldest, was dating Gary Winchcombe (Chain). When the couple split, Jade began dating Basil Reynard (Fox) a bank robber the Chain Gang were trying to apprehend. Jade ended up marrying him. In due course, the twins decided that with the help of their genetic variant friends and the Resistance in Galorvia, to take back the throne. Jade then became Queen with Basil as her consort. They had two children and named them after Jade’s parents. Gloria married the Galorvian Olympic skier Boris Kostellov, and together they established a ski resort, Borisville, in Galorvia as part of the drive to attract tourists to the once closed country. They have twin boys, Arthur and Hector.

From A Jack To A King

A royal palace is burning. The King and Queen are dead. The only hopes for an ancient dynasty flee to England for their lives.

A boy runs from his mother and the people he believes want to mutilate him, and vanishes, seemingly forever.

Gary Winchcombe, the experimental "super-cop" pursues a notorious gang of bank robbers, and starts to discover that his friends and neighbours have secrets he never could have imagined.

Tod Reynard wants to turn his life around. When he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Jade, he knows she might just be the one to help him change his life for the better. He cannot possibly know just how much.

When Jade's twin sister Gloria is kidnapped, old rivalries must be put aside and new associations formed in order to save Gloria's life and restore the rightful order of things.

Available from: Amazon, Amazon Kindle

20 May: Bumble Bees

Today is World Bee Day. Since I've already covered Honey Bees, here are ten things you might not know about bumble bees.

1. Why bumble bee? The word "bumble" means to hum, buzz, drone, or move ineptly or flounderingly. The generic name is Bombus, which was assigned by Pierre André Latreille in 1802. It is derived from the Latin word for a buzzing or humming sound.
2. The first mention of a bumblebee in the English language occurred in 1530, when John Palsgrave wrote, "I bomme, as a bombyll bee dothe." Another word which has been used for a bumble bee is "dumbledor".
3. There are over 250 species in the genus, including the Bombus dahlbomii of South America, which is the largest bumblebee. The queens of this species are sometimes described as looking like flying Mice.
4. Unlike honeybees, bumblebees do not produce Honey, but they play an important role in pollination.
5. They also differ from honeybees in that they don't die if they sting. Male bumblebees can't sting at all, and while the females can, they generally don't unless their nest is being attacked.
6. Another difference is that bumblebees don't perform complex dances to tell other bees where the pollen is. When they return from a successful foraging mission they'll run around the nest for a while before going out again. It's thought they are somehow communicating using the buzzing sounds their wings make.
7. Their metabolism is extremely fast. They have to eat pretty much all the time. A bumblebee with a full stomach will use up all its energy in about 40 minutes.
8. A queen bumblebee can store sperm and use it several months later to fertilise her eggs (which are shaped like sausages). Fertilised eggs hatch into female bees while unfertilised ones produce male bees. Hence a female bumblebee is 75 percent related to her sisters, but only 50 percent related to her children, who get half their genes from their father. Male bumblebees have only one chromosome.
9. It's often said that the laws of aerodynamics prove the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. Nobody knows where that urban myth originated. It may have been a result of an anecdote about an unnamed Swiss aerodynamicist at a dinner party, who performed some rough calculations and came to that conclusion as a joke. Obviously, they do fly - A bumblebee flaps its wings 200 times per second. That’s a similar RPM to some motorcycle engines. While foraging, bumblebees can reach ground speeds of up to 15 m/s (54 km/h).
10. The Flight of the Bumblebee is a piece of classical music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. It represents Prince Guidon being turned into a bumblebee so he can fly away to visit his father, Tsar Saltan, in the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan.

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Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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20th August: World Mosquito Day

Today is World Mosquito Day. It was on August 20 1897 when British doctor Sir Ronald Ross worked out that mosquitoes carry malaria. He described the creature as a “grey moquito with dappled wings”. This discovery won him the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902, the first Nobel prize to be won by a British person.

1. The word mosquito is Spanish and literally means, "little fly."
2. The first reference to a mosquito in English was in 1572. It was described as “A certeine gnat or flie … which biteth both men and women in their sleepe.”
3. Not all mosquitoes will bite you. There are more than 3,500 species of mosquito but only about 200 bite people. Some only bite birds or reptiles. Even within the species that do like human Blood, they won't all bite you. A male mosquito isn't interested in your blood at all. They much prefer flower nectar. It is only the females which bite, and even then only when they are preparing to lay eggs. They are only doing it for their children. When not about to lay eggs they will eat nectar as well.
4. Why do mosquito bites itch? They're not technically bites as mosquitoes don't have teeth. They pierce your skin with a long pointy proboscis with two tubes. They suck up the blood though one, and use the other to inject saliva to stop the blood coagulating before they've finished their meal. The reason "bites" itch is because most people have an allergic reaction to mosquito spit.
5. A mosquito can guzzle up to three times its own weight in blood. However, since they are so tiny it would take about 1.2 million bites to drain a human body of all its blood.
6. Mosquitoes lay their eggs in stagnant Water, about 300 at a time. For some species, a puddle is sufficient. The eggs hatch into larvae known as wrigglers which feed on organic material in the water. They then pupate and become adults in a few days.
7. Mosquitoes' wings beat at 300-600 times a second, which is why they make that annoying whining sound. What you may not know is that mosquitoes looking for a mate listen out for this sound. When they meet a suitable mate, their wing beats synchronise.
8. They don't fly very fast - top speed is about 1.5mph - about a quarter of human walking speed, so a mosquito isn't going to chase you down to feed on you - it would never catch you! They don't tend to travel very far from their hatching place, although there is a species that lives in Salt marshes which can travel about 40 miles in its lifetime. Which isn't very long. Male mosquitoes only live about 10 days. Females can live up to eight weeks in good conditions.
9. How do they locate you? They can smell the CO2 on your breath and follow it like a trail. They can also smell human sweat and unlike us, find it attractive. They can detect octenol, a chemical released in sweat, as well as cholesterol, folic acid, certain bacteria, skin lotions, and perfume. They also have heat sensors which can detect the warm blood in your veins.
10. How to avoid them? Scientists reckon that DEET remains the most effective repellent. Or only go out when the temperature is less than 50 degrees F, when most species shut down and hibernate, or in the hottest part of the day, when they'll be resting. Don't wear dark clothing as dark colours absorb heat making it easier for them to find you. Using a fan helps, too - the movement of air caused by a fan makes it difficult for the tiny creatures to control their flight.

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15th March: Termite Awareness Week

13-19 March is Termite Awareness week. Here are some things you might not know about termites.

1. The word termite comes from the Latin word terere, meaning "to rub, wear, erode". An old term for them is "white ants", although they are not ants. The word "termite was first used in 1781. A termite nest is called a terminarium or termitaria.
2. They are cousins of the cockroach, having evolved from a common ancestor in the Jurassic or Triassic period.
3. There are about 3,100 different species of termite, found all over the world except for Antarctica - they don't like the cold! A thousand species are found in Africa, but only ten in Europe.
4. Termites are viewed as pests in some areas but on the whole are of great ecological importance. They feed on dead plant matter and animal dung, so they have an important role in recycling waste. They are also food for a vast number of animals, insects and birds including bees, centipedes, cockroaches, Crickets, dragonflies, Frogs, Aardvarks, anteaters, Bats, Bears, echidnas, foxes, Mice, Pangolins and chimpanzees.
5. Humans eat them too in many parts of the world, especially when food crops are scarce. Termite queens are a delicacy. Termites are good sources of fat and protein and are said to taste rather like nuts when cooked. Indigenous Australians, however, never eat them, even though they know they could. Nobody knows why not.
6. Termites build their nests out of partially digested material and poo. Some species nests are entirely underground while others build mounds which can be 3 to 4 metres (9 to 13 feet) high and 2.5 metres (8 feet) wide. The tallest termite mound ever found was in the Democratic Republic of Congo and was 12.8 metres (42ft). They also build "shelter tubes" on walls or trees to protect commuting workers from predators.
7. Termites usually measure between 4 to 15 millimetres (0.16 to 0.59 in) in length. There was once a giant species in Austria which had a wingspan of 76 millimetres (3.0 in) and a body length of 25 millimetres (0.98 in), but it is now extinct. The largest termites alive now are the queens of the species Macrotermes bellicosus, measuring up to 10 centimetres (4 in).
8. Like ants and bees, termites live in colonies and have specialised roles within it. There are soldiers, workers, kings and queens. Young termites, known as nymphs, and soldiers cannot feed themselves, so the workers have to feed them. Soldiers and workers of most species do not have eyes or wings. They rely on their legs to get around, and on pheromones and sense of smell to find food and communicate.
9. Termite queens are the longest lived insects in the world and can live as long as 50 years. Kings and queens mate for life after pairing up during a nuptial flight. The couple go off to find a suitable place to build a nest, and only then do they mate. A mature queen can produce as many as 40,000 eggs a day, and although the male sticks around and continues to fertilise her, the queen can switch from sexual reproduction to asexual reproduction in order to produce potential replacements for herself.
10. Each termite colony has its own distinct smell, determined by genetics and diet. This means termites can distinguish between members of their own colony and strangers. Colonies literally go to war with each other over food and territory.

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4th May: Silkworms

In the French Revolutionary Calendar, today was the day of the Silkworm. Here are 10 things you probably didn't know about how silk is produced.

1. The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori.
2. The moths are blind, cannot eat and cannot fly. They depend on humans to find them a mate. Once they have laid their eggs, they die.
3. A silkworm's preferred food is white mulberry leaves. It stuffs its face with them until it has grown to 10,000 times the weight it was when hatched.
4. If the moth is allowed to emerge from its cocoon, the silk is damaged - so silk production requires that the creature inside must die, usually be immersing it in boiling water; although there is research into ways of producing good quality silk while allowing the moth to survive.
5. It takes about about 2,000 to 3,000 cocoons to make a pound (0.4 kg) of silk.
6. Silkworms were first domesticated in China over 5000 years ago. It's said silk was discovered by empress Lei Zu, the wife of the Yellow Emperor and the daughter of XiLing-Shi. She was drinking Tea under a tree when a silk cocoon fell into her tea, and she noticed the cocoon unravelled to produce a fine thread.
7. The Chinese were so secretive about the method of making silk that at one time, giving the secret away, or smuggling silkworms out of the country was punishable by death. There are legends about how the secret got out to the rest of the world, including a Chinese princess given in marriage to a Khotan prince who hid silkworms in her hair and Christian monks smuggling them out in a hollow stick.
8. It's not such a big secret now, but China still leads the world in silk production, responsible for about 58,000 tons each year or about 74% of the world’s supply of raw silk.
9. The practice of breeding silkworms is called Sericulture.
10. The dead silkworms aren't always wasted - they are eaten in some parts, boiled or fried with Salt, herbs, chilli or soy sauce. In the future, they may be taken into space as food for astronauts on long term missions.

March 14: Moth Day

Today is Moth Day: A day to learn about and appreciate moths. Here are ten facts about moths:

1. Moths belong to the same family as Butterflies. There are about ten times as many species of moth as there are of butterfly, that is 160,000 species of moth in the world, many of which have yet to be described. Moths evolved long before butterflies, fossils having been found that may be 190 million years old.
2. How can you tell a moth from a butterfly? It can be tricky. While many moths are nocturnal, not all of them are. A fairly reliable way to tell is that butterflies have tiny clubs at the end of their antenna and moths don't.
3. Some adult moths never eat. Some drink nectar, but others have no mouth parts at all, such as the Luna moth. It lives for about a week and uses that time to mate and lay eggs. There are even some moths without wings - many females of the Tussock family don't have wings.
4. Male moths can detect as little as one molecule of female sex hormone from as much as seven miles/11km away.
5. The original bug in a computer programme was a moth. It got into a relay in Harvard on September 9, 1947 and caused the computer to break down. It was removed and taped to a log book, which is now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
6. The biggest moth in the world is the Hercules moth, which lives in Australia. Its wingspan can reach 27cm. Thysania agrippina, native to South America, has a longer wingspan (up to 28cm/11in) but the Hercules moth's wings have the largest surface area of any insect (300square cm). At the other end of the scale is a yet to be described moth from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was discovered in 2012. It’s only 1 mm long with a wingspan of 2 to 2.5 mm, ie about the size of a printed full stop.
7. The Hawk moth (Sphinx) is the world's fastest flying insect. It can reach speeds of over 50 kph.
8. Moths have been widely studied to help explain evolution, in particular the peppered moth. That's the one with pale and dark varieties. The light moths way outnumbered the dark ones before the industrial revolution, because they were camouflaged against light tree barks. When the trees became darkened by soot, the dark moths flourished because their lighter cousins started getting eaten because predators could now see them.
9. Moths have evolved numerous ways to prevent getting eaten. Some are masters of disguise, and look like less palatable insects, while others have evolved to look like twigs and even bird droppings. Other species have been found to react to ultrasound, and will fly lower when they hear it - to avoid being eaten by Bats. Tiger moths emit clicks which can foil bats' echolocation.
10. Like butterflies, moths need warmth in order to fly, but most have the problem that they can't bask in the sun at night. Instead, they warm themselves up by vibrating their wings, and have hairy bodies to trap the heat. Their hairiness makes them good pollinators. Moth-pollinated flowers tend to be fragrant and white, to allow moths to find them after dark.

15th December: Day of the Cricket

In the French Revolutionary Calendar, today is the day of the Cricket. Here are 10 things you may not know about these insects:

1. There are over 900 species of cricket, belonging to the family Gryllidae.
2. Not all species of cricket chirp. Those that chirp do so by rubbing parts of their wing covers together. It is usually only the males which make a sound.
3. The chirping species also have good hearing. Their eardrums are located on their front legs.
4. Crickets are found all over the world, except at latitudes 55° or higher. They are most common in the tropics. In Malaysia, for example, 88 different species can be heard chirping from near Kuala Lumpur - and it's anyone's guess how many of the mute species were present as well.
5. The higher the temperature the faster a cricket will chirp, and their is even a law describing the relationship between rate of a cricket chirping and the temperature - it's called Dolbear's Law. According to this law, counting the number of chirps produced in 14 seconds by the snowy tree cricket, a species common in the United States, and adding 40 will approximately equal the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
6. When baby crickets hatch, they are about the size of a fruit fly. Then they go through ten larval stages before reaching adulthood.
7. The largest members of the family are the bull crickets, Brachytrupes, which are up to 5 cm (2 in) long.
8. There are a number of superstitions related to crickets in various parts of the world. A cricket chirping, especially inside a house, is in various countries seen as a sign of impending rain, a financial windfall, illness or death. In Brazil, a black cricket in a room is said to portend illness; a grey one, money; and a green one, hope. In China, crickets are considered very lucky and are sometimes kept as pets. Cricket fighting is a traditional Chinese pastime that dates back to the Tang dynasty (618–907).
9. In Vietnam, crickets are seen as a tasty snack when they have been soaked, cleaned and deep fried. It's thought that the food efficiency of crickets could be as much as twenty times higher than that of cattle.
10. Crickets are popular characters in fiction. A talking cricket features in Carlo Collodi's book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, and in the film adaptation he gets a name, Jiminy, and becomes Pinocchio's conscience. Charles Dickens's 1845 novella The Cricket on the Hearth is divided into sections called "Chirps", and tells the story of a cricket which chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to a family. George Selden's 1960 children's book The Cricket in Times Square tells the story of Chester the cricket from Connecticut who is taken, along with the family's other pets, to see Times Square in New York.

14th October: Honey Bee Day

Today is Honey Bee Day, so here are some things you may not know about honey bees:

1. There are only seven species of true honey bee (members of the genus Apis), with 44 subspecies, so honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. The study of honey bees is known as apiology.
2. Worker bees have career progression. When they are young, their job is to clean the hive and feed the larvae, but after a time they lose the ability to produce the royal jelly which the larvae eat and so they move on to building honeycombs and later to defending the hive and collecting the pollen from the forager bees. Finally, they start to fly out of the hive and become foragers themselves.
3. In winter, the bees stay in the hive and cluster around the queen to keep her warm. They produce heat by shivering and can detach their wings so that they can use the wing muscles to generate heat. The bees rotate in the cluster from outside to inside so none of them get too cold. During this time the bees eat the honey they have stored to create energy and the queen stops laying until the spring. Bees also use this technique to get rid of intruders - they cluster around them and heat them up until they die of a combination of heatstroke and carbon dioxide poisoning.
4. Bees collect both nectar and pollen from flowers - nectar to make Honey and pollen for protein.
5. A queen bee has to mate within 20 days of emerging from her queen cell or she will lose the ability to do so. She only mates once, but with multiple males (who die once they've mated). She stores all the sperm and can choose whether or not to fertilise the eggs she lays (can be as many as 2,000 a day). If she chooses to fertilize an egg it becomes a female worker; if not, it becomes a male drone.
6. Honey bees are the only bee species that swarm. A mated queen and a large number of workers will swarm to a new nest site, which some of the workers will have scouted beforehand. When they all get there, they will build the nest. In other species, the queen establishes a colony on her own, or the workers build the nest before she arrives.
7. A single honey bee worker produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
8. Only female bees can sting. Male drones do not have a sting, but instead have larger eyes so that they can find the queen during her mating flight.
9. Everyone knows bees do a "waggle dance" to communicate to each other where the flowers are, but they also do a "tremble dance" which lets the worker bees know they are home and ready to have their nectar collected. Some species also do a kind of Mexican wave by flicking their wings and arching their bodies, which is intended as a warning display to would-be intruders.
10. A bee can fly at up to 15 miles per hour. This is fairly slow compared to other insects, because bees are built for short flights from flower to flower.

19th June: Butterfly Day

19th June is Butterfly Day, so here are 10 things you may not know about butterflies:

1. Butterflies are found on every continent on Earth - except for Antarctica.
2. Butterflies can taste with their feet. They do this by drumming the surface they are standing on (usually a leaf or a piece of fruit) with their feet to release the plant's juices. Butterflies have chemo-receptors on the backs of their legs, and can tell whether what they are standing on is good to eat, either for themselves or for their caterpillars.
3. Caterpillars will munch away at leaves, but adult butterflies can only consume liquids. Mostly nectar, but they will sometimes drink from muddy puddles to get salts and minerals. Males will do this more often than females as they need extra nutrients for sperm production.
4. Butterflies remember things that they learned as caterpillars.
5. They cannot fly when it is cold. If the air temperature falls below 55ºF, they are pretty much stuffed unless they can exercise their wings by shivering, or bask in sunlight. They use their wings like little solar panels, angling them to maximise the amount of heat they absorb.
6. Butterflies can only see clearly up to 12 feet. Within that distance, though, they have good eyesight. They can see some of the colours that we can - red, Green and Yellow. They can also see some that we can't, in the ultraviolet range. Since butterflies have ultraviolet markings on their wings, and flowers also have them, this is a great help to the butterfly when looking for food or a mate.
7. Straight out of the chrysalis, a butterfly cannot fly or eat. Its proboscis is in two parts when it emerges, so the butterfly's first task is to assemble its mouth parts and make sure they are in working order. Then it must wait for its wings to dry out and fill with blood before it can fly.
8. The fastest butterflies fly at 12 miles an hour.
9. Monarch butterflies fly great distances - they migrate every year from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a distance of about 2,000 miles, and back again in the spring.
10. Pacific Grove, California, calls itself "Butterfly Town" and holds a butterfly parade every year. It is against the law to kill a Monarch butterfly there. If you do, there's a $500 fine.