Painted lady

So you have, uh, above all, be very, very careful and cautious with the kind of species that you breed.

And I used to have a big patch of thistles there, and the painted ladies, the big migrants, they are Vanessa, which means butterfly, cardui, which means thistle, the butterfly of the thistles.

Mm-hmm.

Vanessa cardui.

And I had a huge patch of thistles in one of the ne- and that was my source.

I mean, there you can find anything, but now they've cut them, and there are no thistles left.

Why they migrate is not known, but evidence enough has been brought in by eyewitnesses to prove that this does occur.

One flight seen in Switzerland lasted for two hours, the continuous stream of insects being 10 or 15 feet wide and made up of the species called the Painted Lady.

Similar companies have been seen at sea, as Mr. Darwin bears witness, and also before and after tornadoes in certain places.

In Ceylon, a gentleman drove through a cloud of white butterflies for nine miles.

let's get back to the buddleia bush here.

You can see also the painted lady and you can see...

A comma.

Look, there's a comma.

Why? Well, the past two years have been really fantastic, but this year in particular.

And a lot of it is down to the weather.

And while some of our butterflies, like the comma here and like the small tortoiseshell, live in Ireland all year round, we have several migrants, the Red Admiral and the Painted Lady.

And they come from Africa.