PLATE XXIV
THE HUMMING-BIRD HAWK (1)
On a hot summer’s day you may often see this beautiful moth hovering in front of geraniums and other flowers in the garden, with its long trunk plunged deeply down into the blossoms in order to suck up their sweet juices. And if you stand a few feet away and listen carefully, you will hear a low humming noise, which is caused by the rapid movements of the wings. It looks and sounds, in fact, very much like a humming-bird, and people who have lived for many years in hot countries, and have then come to England, have often found it very difficult to believe that they were looking at a moth, and not at one of the beautiful little birds which they had known so well.
The caterpillar of the Humming-bird Hawk is greenish-brown, or bluish-green, sprinkled with tiny white dots, and with a pinkish-white stripe running along each side of its body. Below this is another stripe of dull yellow, and at the end of the body is a blue horn with a yellow tip. It feeds upon bedstraw, and when it has finished growing it buries itself just below the surface of the ground, and then turns into a reddish-brown chrysalis.
PLATE XXIV
THE BEE HAWK (2)
There are really two “bee hawks,” which you can recognise at once by their transparent wings. And as one of them has a narrow black border to its wings, while the other has a broad one, they are called the Narrow-bordered Bee Hawk, and the Broad-bordered Bee Hawk. And really they do look more like very big bumble-bees than moths. They fly by day, like the “humming-bird hawk,” and you may sometimes see them hovering in front of rhododendron blossoms on a bright sunny day in May, and darting away at the slightest alarm with almost the speed of light. But they are not very common, and in many parts of the country they are never seen at all.
The caterpillar of the “broad-bordered bee hawk” feeds upon honeysuckle, and that of the “narrow-bordered bee hawk” upon field scabious—that common low plant which looks so much like a rather small thistle. They are both green in colour, dotted with yellowish-white, and with a brown horn at the end of the body. When they have finished growing they spin little silken webs on the surface of the ground, and turn to chrysalids inside them.
PLATE XXIV
THE CURRANT CLEARWING (3)
The “clearwings” are very odd little moths with transparent wings, which have no scales upon them at all, except just on the narrow black borders. The consequence is that they do not look in the least like moths. They look much more like flies, or gnats, or wasps, or hornets. They nearly all come out in June and July, and you may see them resting on leaves in the hot sunshine.
Another curious thing about the “clearwings” is that their caterpillars feed, not upon the leaves of plants and trees, like almost all other caterpillars, but upon the pith of the stems or the twigs, or even upon the solid wood of the trunk or the branches; so it is very difficult indeed to find them. When they are fully fed they turn into chrysalids with rows of tiny hooks along their bodies, by means of which they can wriggle their way backwards and forwards along the burrows which they made when they were caterpillars.