October 2024 • Nebraskaland 35
and elsewhere throughout the species'
range, native violets have greatly
declined in grasslands due to heavy
grazing, herbicide use and other
factors. As you can easily surmise, this
is bad news for the regal fritillary, as
its caterpillars cannot survive without
food.
This is where Sarah Bailey,
Conservation and Education Director
for the Prairie Plains Resource Institute
in Aurora, comes into play. For 14
years, she has been growing violets in
a greenhouse and transplanting them
into eastern Nebraska grasslands for
the benefi t of regal fritillaries. This is
the story of the butterfl y and Bailey's
violet-growing eff orts to help them.
Life Cycle
Like all butterfl ies, the regal
fritillary's life history has four stages:
egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and adult.
Males emerge from the chrysalis in
mid-June, while the females emerge
one to two weeks later. The males
patiently perch on plants, waiting for
females to fl y by, or actively fl y about
prairies searching for females to mate
with. After mating, the no-longer-
needed males soon die.
The eggs develop slowly within
the female and are not laid until late
summer or early fall. Females walk
about the thick prairie vegetation
laying over 2,000 eggs singly on
dead and living vegetation, including
violets if she happens upon them. The
eggs hatch in three to four weeks, and
without eating, the tiny hatchling
caterpillars immediately crawl down
into clumps of dried grass, where
they enter a period of suspended
development and overwinter.
A regal fritillary delicately sips nectar from a common milkweed. The butterfl y also favors nectar from
native thistles, conefl owers, gayfeathers, ironweeds and joe-pye weed. CHRIS HELZER, THE NATURE CONSERVANCY
