Sherry, Spring & Summer Azures are my favorites. I've never seen either in person though I've read that both can be found in Iowa. Keeping my fingers crossed they'll stumble upon my garden someday.

So exciting that you saw one - spring will be here before we know it - even way up here! :)

Michaela

That's exciting...I'm so ready for spring but we're having several cool days this week & next!

I've seen a couple of sulphurs & a cabbage white so far here in North Texas.

Miss Sherry, do you have host plants for the Azures & if so...what are you growing???

The spring azure complex uses many different host plants (including the galls of cherry trees!) and I'm sure I have a lot of them, but I've never found a caterpillar. Since the butterfly is so small, the caterpillar would have to be tiny enough that I wouldn't see it readily.

I saw my first snout EVER yesterday! Even though they're shown on range maps as occurring here, in all these years of watching butterflies, I've never seen one. This one was basking on my Miss Molly butterfly bush (not flowering) and, unfortunately, I didn't have my camera with me. I noticed that it had goatwing/question mark-looking wings, so I looked it up, and they are indeed closely related to question marks and goatweed leafwings. It said they used hackberries/Celtis as host plant. The only Celtis that grows around here is sugarberry/C. laevigata, but I've only seen it growing on the flood plain of the Leaf River. I've tried growing a regular hackberry and a Georgia hackberry, but they died, so I think I'll order some sugarberries. They might use my hops vines or winged elm trees, since question marks use those as host plants.

I've continued to see cloudless sulphurs and spring azures. Spring isn't here right now, though, because we're supposed to have a slight freeze tonight.

'Won't be too long, though! :)

Sherry

P.S. I won't go into the details, but II've had extreme trouble logging on, since the ownership of this forum changed. I had to change my name to MissSherryG. I'll check and see if they used that name or went back to MissSherry.

Well, they displayed my whole name, so I changed my profile. Let me see how this does.

No, they changed the long post to MissSherry!