Narrow-banded bluebottle
The narrow-banded bluebottle is a black swallowtail butterfly with a narrow band of spots across its wings. It lives in the rainforests of southern India and Sri Lanka. It flies fast and reacts in a flash, so it is very hard to catch.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
It usually flies just above the tops of the rainforest trees.
The males like to drink at the edges of puddles, often by the road. Sometimes eight of them sit at the same puddle.
It goes on long journeys. In the Nilgiri hills in India, it once made up about 5 out of every 100 travelling butterflies.
Its caterpillar is green and very slow. It likes to rest in the middle of the top side of a leaf.
Its eggs are yellowish, and the mother lays them one at a time on leaves.
Most asked questions about Narrow-banded bluebottle
?Where does the narrow-banded bluebottle live?
In southern India and Sri Lanka, in damp rainforests low in the hills.
?What does the narrow-banded bluebottle eat?
The butterfly drinks flower nectar. The caterpillars eat leaves of trees like cinnamon.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Graphium teredon
- Group
- Butterflies
- Family
- Papilionidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Lepidoptera > Papilionidae
- Lives on
- Asia
- Also known as
- Southern bluebottle
Where the facts come from
- Graphium teredon (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 Vinayaraj. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this 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.
Bug Wiki honey jar For grown-ups: Bug Wiki is free, with no ads and no tracking. A small tip helps keep it online.Leave a tip
Monarch butterfly
Peacock butterfly
Blue morpho
Old World swallowtail
Small white
Eastern tiger swallowtail
Vietnamese centipede
Giant jumping spider
Army ant
Shocking pink dragon millipede
Giant forest ant
Mango stem borer.jpg){kind=link}