Butterflies are free.....on Tuesdays

Did you know that butterflies have taste buds in their feet and legs? They do!

The National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution recently installed a new permanent exhibit in the insect-plant co-evolution section that is a working butterfly house. It's a fun little exhibit, though "little" is the operative word here.....for a segment of the museum that charges $6 per person to view, I really expected it to be several times larger than it is. Fortunately, though, the butterflies are free on Tuesdays, subject to timed ticket availability.

The butterfly house is a high temperature and high humidity-controlled room with a lot of tropical and flowering plants. An assortment of butterflies—varying, due to hatching and breeding cycles—fly free around the room, sometimes even alighting on tourists, or, more dangerously, alighting on the walking path where the occasional child steps on and kills a butterfly. There are a number of different kinds of very ripe fruit that have been set out in various places as butterfly food. The room also includes a big hiberation case with cocoons in various stages of development. On either end of the room are airlocks to keep the butterflies in as tourists come and go.

If you like butterflies, go see the exhibit (go early in the morning while there are still tickets). Or, you can go to my Flickr album for a little slide show: Butterfly slide show.