Snowberry clearwing

Description:

Adults are quite variable in appearance; Bumblebee mimic. The thorax is golden or olive-golden in color, abdomen is black dorsally with 1-2 segments just prior to terminal end being yellow to various extent, while black ventrally. H. diffinis is the only eastern species to exhibit blue abdominal tufts on the first black segment in some freshly emerged specimens. Wings mostly clear with reddish brown terminal borders and dark scaling along veins. While wing maculation is too variable to be 100% diagnostic, diffinis typically has very thin terminal borders and the discal cell is elongate and without scales. However, diffinis can always be distinguished from gracilis and thysbe by two diagnostic characteristics: 1) the black band that crosses the eye and travels down the lateral side of the thorax; 2) diffinis always has black legs.

Habitat:

Semi rural wildlife habitat.

Notes:

Visiting the butterfly bed we created last year as part of our backyard habitat project. We started creating our backyard wildlife habitat just over a year ago. When we moved back into the house that my husband had built in the mid 1990s before he moved to Europe, both the house & the land had been badly neglected as the property had been let our for many years. The land was basically all pasture, with little of interest to any wildlife except for birds like mockingbirds & robins that like closely mowed spaces. On a positive note the land (8.7 acres of sloping pasture) was bordered on one side by mixed woods, with a meadow beyond it at one end & an overgrown drainage ditch at the other separating the land from the road. Last year we concentrated on getting some structural planting in - include creating a 300' hedgerow to separate our land from the meadow, a shade garden of fruiting trees & shrubs to provide foraging & cover for the birds, & around 100 native trees to create "wildlife corridors" to allow wildlife to more safely travel across our land. The butterfly bed was created to delineate our land from our neighbor's & to provide a variety of predominantly native plants to attract in pollinating insects. The bed measures around 40' long & 15' deep & is planted with a mixture of aslepias (for the monarchs), fennel (black swallowtails), verbena boniarensis, monarda, oregano, hyssop (native agastache) and salvias. A neighbor donated several buddleias which we plan to remove once the other plants are more established. We also planted a couple of pipevines & a crossvine in the shade garden. The impact was almost immediate! Within days of the first plant coming into flower we saw a noticeable increase in the number of butterflies visiting our yard, & we soon saw our first monarch caterpillars on the milkweeds!