Green-veined white
The green-veined white is a creamy white butterfly. Look under its back wings: the lines on them are dusted with dark scales, so they look greenish. That is how it got its name. It flutters along damp meadows and the edges of woods.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
You can tell a female from a male by the wing spots: she has two black spots on each front wing, he has only one.
Male butterflies give off a scent that people can smell too. It smells a bit like lemon peel.
It spends the winter as a green pupa, waiting for spring.
It can live high in the mountains, up to 3600 metres in Morocco.
Its caterpillar often shares a plant with the orange tip caterpillar, but they do not fight over food: one eats the leaves and the other the flowers and seeds.
Most asked questions about Green-veined white
?What does the green-veined white eat?
The butterfly drinks flower nectar. Its caterpillar eats wild plants like garlic mustard, cuckooflower and wild radish.
?How do you tell a green-veined white from a cabbage white?
Look under the back wings. The green-veined white has dark, greenish lines along the veins.
?Is the green-veined white a garden pest?
Hardly ever. It likes wild plants much better than garden cabbages.
Myth buster
Myth: All white butterflies in the garden are cabbage whites that eat your cabbages.
Truth: Not all. The green-veined white looks very similar, but its caterpillars prefer wild plants and rarely touch garden cabbages.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Pieris napi
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Pieridae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Pieridae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America
Where the facts come from
- Green-veined white (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Charles J. Sharp. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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