Maybe a Buddleja! Buddlejas have a strong fascination for Red Admiral Butterflys, and are nicely perfumed.

Hi--Up here in zone 5 there is plenty of downtime from butterflying. I enjoy the first couple of months of no gardening stuff, and then in January I start to go crazy waiting for spring. Since I'm new to butterflies and especially caterpillars, I spent a lot of time researching cats and butterflies--and then started to order seeds for nectar and host plants. I am dead set on getting buckeye cats and viceroy cats and finding frit cats that must be in my yard. I think just need to start looking for them earlier too--beginning in May. I got the Burriss' book (just so beautiful and wonderful to read--we need more books like this!) and also read a bio of 17th century woman who broke the mold of expectations of what women were supposed to do and decided to leave husband and home and study the life cycle of butterflies at a time when people still believed in spontaneous generation. That's what I've been doing to keep myself occupied in snowy NH. I am so excited for spring to arrive and can start looking for cats!

Do you mean you've got adult butterflies in a screened in area? If so, you should let them out immediately! Adults shouldn't be kept in an enclosure. I'm not surprised ants have found them - in nature, this doesn't happen, because the butterflies can fly away. If this is happening to free flying butterflies, please explain. Sherry

We found a black swallowtail cat on our parsley yesterday. My daughter built an entire habitat for the poor thing. It ignored it all and immediately started making a chrysalis. Now my kids are out poking around in the parsley every few minutes, looking for more. We had fun reading up on what they eat and how the various instars look. My kids can't believe that Queen Anne's Lace is in the carrot family (swallowtails like carrots). We pretty much squashed all bugs up until this year. But we spent this summer learning the difference between beneficials and pests. Now we let the hornets and spiders live, and watch the mud daubers make circles in the mud at the edges of puddles. We know why the paper wasps like our wood plant stakes, and talk to the preying mantis that lives in the iris patch. We were heroes at a birthday party when we were able to identify a cicada killer dragging a cicada carcass through the grass. My kids are getting a lot more than tomatoes out of the yard this year.