This lovely lady comes to you from a warmer time, in Maine, when I was visiting the home of a friend.  At first I thought it was a butterfly that had got faded in the wash (or the sun) but read an article on it recently and discovered that this is who she is! She is an astonishing creature, as you can read:

 "Professor Jane Hill of the University of York, in England, explains: “The Painted Lady just keeps going, breeding and moving.” Annually, those steps take the whole population from northern Europe to Africa and back again.

“This tiny creature weighing less than a gram [0.04 oz] with a brain the size of a pin head and no opportunity to learn from older, experienced individuals, undertakes an epic intercontinental migration,” states Richard Fox, surveys manager at Butterfly Conservation. This insect was “once thought to be blindly led, at the mercy of the wind, into an evolutionary dead end in the lethal British winter,” Fox adds. Yet this study “has shown Painted Ladies to be sophisticated travellers.”"

For #WingsofButterflies +On the Wings of Butterflies! curated by +Cicely Robin Laing and +Sharon Jeannette (I don't have this theme in the calendar, which is really too bad! – ladies, please can you fill in the information on the +Public Calendar of Daily Photography Themes so I can add it??)
Also for #inpraiseofpollinators ++In Praise of Polllinators by +Dusty Gedge
and for #floralfriday +FloralFriday by the perenially bloomng +Tamara Pruessner