Color can range from red to chocolate, milk-white to mauve, clearest blue to deepest royal purple. Combinations of colors such as red on the outside of the petals and yellow on the inside are found in the species Aquilegia canadensis . The Rocky Mountain columbine, A. caerulea , has true-blue sepals and spurs, with white blades. The graceful foliage can vary in color from a deep green to a whitish or bluish green, and there are variegated forms. Their adult lives are spent as flies with a dedication to laying eggs on their favorite plants.
Many species are very specific as to their chosen incubators for the young.
A few gaily spread their prodigy any place convenient. Everyone knows that fly eggs hatch into yucky maggots. The young larvae, a polite term for maggot, proceed to spend their lives just under the surface of the leaves gorging themselves. Each chomp leads to the next, forming a tunnel for their bodies to follow the mouth up front doing the chomping. Those tunnels appear as unsightly yellowish-white patterns on the green leaf surface.