I plant butterfly and humming bird attracting plants. There are butterfly clouds around the house right now. You can see up to about 30 when looking in any location. There has to be at least a hundred in the yard. It’s been like that for 3 days now. One stayed on my shoulder yesterday like a pirate’s parrot for maybe 10 minutes. It did blend in well with the shirt pattern though. The Japanese beetles have been in large quantities for the same amount of time. I try not to spray pesticide, so I’ve been squashing hundreds of them. Gross. They zero in on my dahlias. I found a grasshopper hoard that emerged from a egg cluster last night. A two foot swath covered in quarter inch grasshoppers. I sprayed it last night, and hope I got most of them.
What kind of butterflies are they? What sort of plants attract them?
How beautiful!
Are you really that nervous during the Catholic church services? 
The correct term is en masse
You think that’s bad? I read the OP as I have butterflies in my ass.
They eat nettle as caterpillars, so I’m not worried about all the plants in the garden. They are mainly going after the dahlias right now. Anything blooming is food though. The delphiniums attract many butterflies and humming birds, but are starting to peter out. They’ll be flowering a bit later again. The next mass attractant will be the cosmos. The finches and song birds love to gather and eat the seeds in late summer and fall.
I have butterflies in mass.
How do you get them to kneel in the pews?
Okay, so Annie was first with the mass theme but I still wanted to say it.
So anyway, any pictures?
No pictures. It’s super hot and humid right now so the butterflies are mostly perched, staying out of the heat. I guess you could say laid back and staying cool. I’ll be drenched through in 5 minutes. Off to the garden work. I hand pollenated some of the squash and pumpkins this last week, to make sure the first fruit that can set, does. I had around 200 dahlias this spring at planting time. I gave away about 60, so I must have about 140 now. They bloom all summer through fall and look great, but I dread fall and digging them all up.
Huh? Squash plants need to be pollinated by hand? We’re growing acorn squash for the first time this year. Will ours be okay if we don’t do anything?
We used to get clouds of butterflies at the old place, around the sedum. Lovely. I should plant some here.
You don’t have to hand pollinate squash. For the first few female flowers, I like to be sure they get pollinated. They are the first ones ready to pick after all. There are so few nearby male flowers I don’t leave it to the insects to pollinate. After a couple weeks into flowering, you can count on most getting pollinated. The fruits that drop off are ones that didn’t pollinate. Position your vines to grow a nice shaped pumpkins. Raising it above the ground with some slack, will give you a perfect pumpkin, when it grows huge.
I found out that trying to photograph flying butterflies even in large quantities is futile. Little specks lost in the background. Catching the movement with your eyes is important. I did take a couple individual pictures to come later.
Wonderful! Does your garden get that many butterflies every year?
I’ve only been lucky to see that many in the open 3 times in my life.
Not every year.
There are a few different butterflies mixed in.
I hadn’t seen Monarchs for the past two years. This year a few are back. They had a massive die off a couple years ago in Mexico.
I went to a butterfly garden at a museum once. It was filled with people wearing red, as it’s supposed to attract the butterflies. My mother was wearing not red, but Victoria’s Secret Vanilla Body Spray in her hair. She had three butterflies land on her and lay eggs on her. Yuck.
The people made us squish the eggs since they were non-native species and they didn’t want to cause some sort of ecological nightmare.
Glad I’m not the only one. My brain keeps adding an apostrophe to the title: I have butterflies in m’ass
I have salvia, coriopsis and geraniums on my deck and I’ve had oodles of butterflies this summer. One in particular has caught my eye. It’s red and black (but doesn’t look like the Red Admiral) and it’s flying around like a crazy thing day after day. It has erratic flight and I’ve never seen it sit still for a second. What do you suppose it is? Northwestern 'burbs of Chicago, Illinois here.
I don’t know what you have. 35 years ago us kids would collect butterflies and we checked out every book the library had on them. Likely I would have known then.
Monarchs like milkweed. I never had a mass of them but I did have a crysilis (sp?) on my tomato plant (right next to the milkweed) and came out one morning to see the butterfly drying its wings for the first time. Then it lit out for Mexico (hopefully not perishing in the Great Butterfly Death Discord refered to 
)
Many head to a mountain in Mexico for the winter, and are in large groups. I find the die off was in 2002. My sense of passing time has been messed up for along time.
http://monarchwatch.org/news/021102.html
A good picture of them hanging in trees.
http://www.ecology.info/monarch-butterfly-page-4.htm
Whew. Glad to know I wasn’t the only person who saw the title of this thread and thought the same thing. :smack: