These butterfly pictures were taken in the Hilbert Conservatory at the White River Gardens next to the Indianapolis Zoo. There were about ten varieties of species easily spotted within a half an hour. Almost any color of butterfly is included and most are beautiful. If you are in the indy area and you visit the zoo, make sure to stop by the butterfly exhibit. It is included in your zoo admission price and is worth a walk through. It's easy to just point and shoot great pictures when the butterflies are all around you. Make sure to take a camera with you.

Butterflies are not only pretty, they are an important part of our ecosystem. They only rank second to bees in pollination of plants.  Humans depend on these beautiful insects more than we may realize.

Egg, caterpillar, pupa/chrysalis, butterfly, the life cycle of the butterfly is dramatic to say the least.  The pupa stage is one of the butterfly's life stages. It hangs upside down like a bat and develops into a beautiful, graceful butterfly. Pupas have a hard candy shell so they will melt in your mouth not in your hand, just kidding. Just think if humans had a stage like this. Talk about an awkward stage. Even awkward tween years would seem easy compared to this. It would totally be worth it though when we take off that first time and float effortlessly through the air. Then comes the last stage, getting eaten by a bird.

Believe it or not this is a video about how to do emergency surgery on a butterfly's broken wing.  The guy in the video makes it look so easy, as if he is repairing the wing on some sort of balsa wood glider that just crashed into the ground.  I am not sure who has time for this, but it is interesting.  It involves collecting extra wings first, so it takes more planning than a normal person would have done.