Who doesn't like butterflies, maybe fruit growers, foresters and gardeners who know what a butterfly is before it becomes majesticly beautiful. But the rest of the people perceive butterflies as a romantic part of nature, fleeting, beautiful, elusive.
As it turns out, butterflies, although innocent, delicate and small, are great fliers. They can fly several thousand kilometers in a few dozen hours.
Of course, there are plenty of butterflies, and we are most interested in daytime butterflies, because we meet them most often. Painted lady (Vanessa Cardui), a very popular butterfly in Europe, is one of them.
Painted Lady spends most of her life traveling. Its beginning is North Africa. There he is born in early spring, but he does not stay in Africa for long. It gets hot and dry there too quickly, and that's when the Painted Lady heads north.
This butterfly, although it doesn't look like it, is a great flier. It can fly from Libya, Egypt or Morocco across the Mediterranean Sea to Central Europe. Here it spends the summer to return to Africa in the fall and give birth to offspring. And it's hard to believe that such a small creature can cover such gigantic routes. Of course, only some individuals travel such distances, but they are still impressive.
This butterfly does not like forests, prefers open spaces, and their food is nectar from flowers. They love gardens, meadows, arable fields, roadside ditches, where there is always a large amount of vegetation.
How to recognize it? The front wings are orange with black tips. On the underside of the wings there are black, so-called peacock eyes. We often see them on flowers, and in warm periods they are seen even in big cities.
