Fyi,

I collected dung beetles using dung (of all types, including mostly human) for over 40 years here in Louisiana.  I found that Celastrina will feed upon dung and also feed upon rotting piles of insects I would dump out of my automatic capture light traps.  Seems that an enterprising researchers could devise live or dead capture traps to automatically trap these butterflies.  I also captured over 100 adult Celastrina in my light traps over the past half century.  I did run fermenting fruit bait traps mostly for moths and butterflies here are our home location and I was able to capture typically around 40,000 butterflies each and every year we ran a series of traps.

Before you tell me why don't I do this myself, I already have spent the past 53 years designing an operating nearly 500 insect traps here in Louisiana every day and night of every year regardless of temperature or other weather conditions.  Last year, my wife Charlotte and I began for the first time to reduce our collecting footprint, we are getting too old.  Here is a link to an unpublished manuscript I put together about 8 years ago illustrating a few of our traps we used over the past half century.

Images of some of the insect traps designed, fabricated and operated by

Images of some of the insect traps designed, fabricated and operated by A pictorial of insect traps illustrations of some of the over 400 insect traps and associated collecting devices...

Vernon Antoine Brou Jr. 

On Saturday, May 7, 2022, 06:02:39 PM CDT, Norbert Kondla <nkondla@...> wrote:

Here is a screen clip from iNaturalist. Shows all Celastrina records from a portion of North America. 

This map partly shows where the most reporting observers live/observe but in the case of the relatively few records from the Great Plains; I think this also reflects the relative scarcity of habitat for butterflies that feed on flowering shrubs. 

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Norbert Kondla

Calgary, Alberta, Canada  (elevation 1060 metres asl)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/118126948@N03/