Introduction
It has been a busy week of colony inspections for swarm prep. No charged queen cups to be seen but I’ve set up a bivouac lure in the middle of the apiary in case I miss a queen cell and a colony swarms. We know that when swarms leave their hives, they settle nearby in a cluster to debate the new home location. In my garden they often settle low down in the hedge, but I’m experimenting with a ‘swarm post’ this year. I’ve made a wooden board for them to settle on. The post is set fairly firmly in the ground but it will be easy to remove when I need to shake the swarm into a new hive or nuc box.
Observation Hive
Yesterday I got the observation hive set up in the bee shed again. It was a difficult job getting the bees transferred from a nuc, and it is always easier when you use a small cast swarm to fill the hive. However, as always teamwork pays off and with Linton, Claire, and Louise helping the job was done as quickly as possible without too much stress for the bees. They settled quickly into the hive and started festooning in the gap between the frames. When the hive was designed by Tom Seeley in 2016, it was built to house jumbo 12″ x 14” frames which I no longer use so the bees now have to fill the spaces between the standard National brood frames with comb themselves.
Today is cooler but when I took the insulated protective covers from the sides of the hive the glass was warm and there were enough bees to keep the brood warm. They had already starting making comb to fill the gaps. I’ve left the parent nuc to make a new queen. I moved a nuc from the back apiary. Louise was taking that one home with her. I placed the queenless nuc in its place to mop up any returning foragers from Louise’s nuc that were not at home when I shut them in. Normally I would move bees in the early morning or evening when they were all at home. However, in this situation the foragers had been busy on an oil seed rape crop and were welcomed into the new nuc with their loads of sweet nectar. All went well.
Book Review
I find moths fascinating but knew very little about them till I reviewed this recently published book sent to me by Princeton University Press. You might have read a previous blog about the elephant hawk moth larva that I found crossing the road a few years ago. That sparked my curiosity and I’ve been looking out for day moths since then.
Title: Moths Of The World—A Natural History
Author: David L. Wagner
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 22 April 2025
ISBN: 978-0-691-24828-8
Hardback, £25, 240 pages
Moths Of The World—A Natural History by David L. Wagner is a detailed guide to the different moth families and species originating from three clades; non-ditrysian microlepidoptera, ditrysian microlepidoptera and microlepidoptera. The author is professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the university of Connecticut and is a renowned world expert on butterflies and moths. He has written seven earlier books on these amazing animals.
This fascinating publication comprises an introduction followed by three main parts covering the taxonomic groups. There is a glossary, index and additional reading and resource index to guide the reader and support the study of moths.
We discover that moths are the most successful species of animal on earth and they transfer more nutrients and energy than any other insect. They have a close relationship to flowering plants having evolved around the same time. The earliest moth fossil has been dated to around 212 million years ago. Moths feed on plants and in turn provide food for a wide variety of other animals including; frogs, lizards, bats, birds, foxes and bears. With over 160,000 named species, and more still to discover, they are found in all parts of the world.
The introduction addresses evolution, life cycles, anatomy and biology, diversity, and the importance of moths. There is guidance on how to find and identify moths, how to photograph them, and how we can conserve this precious animal. Like other insects, moths face the challenges of habitat loss and climate change, but light pollution is an enormous problem for this group. Interestingly, moth sexual structures are rapidly evolving and these features are of key importance for taxonomists identifying and categorising moths.
The book’s target readership is entomologists and students, but this magnificently illustrated book will appeal to a wide variety of readers interested in nature and uniquely beautiful animals. It has been written clearly and carefully so that it is easy for the lay person to understand. The photographs are stunning and there are hundreds to admire.
Butterflies are really daytime moths, and for every species of butterfly there are at least 15 times as many moths. They both make up the order of Lepidoptera which means ‘scaled wings’ — the name comes from the Greek language. We learn that the scales are key to communication and sexual selection, and some contain chemicals to be used in defence against predation. Polar moths have dark scales to absorb heat. Most moths are nocturnal and attracted to highly scented, mostly white, flowers but we can find many daytime species in our gardens if we look closely.
There is so much to learn about how moths cope with their world and you might be surprised to learn that they have a bat warning system in the form of an ‘ear’ which is really a cavity below each hindwing. The cavity has a thin membrane that vibrates when exposed to high frequency calls from bats and it allows the moth to avoid some bat predation in a world with many threats. Have you ever wondered how some moths, such as the deaths-head moth, can make audible sounds? Wagnor explains this along with many other interesting things about moths and their world.
Moth migration is an intriguing phenomenon and we learn more about that, and how migrating moths can be a nuisance for humans in some countries —the bogong moth migration in Eastern Australia has been known to slow down trains and shut down outdoor events.
Moths Of The World—A Natural History joins the excellent informative series of books, that includes Wasps of The World and Bees of the World, and I highly recommend it.