Many of the moths so caught will remain quiet in the boxes and can be taken home alive without much fear of damage. All may then be killed at the same time by packing all the pill boxes in some vessel of sufficient accommodation, and shutting them in with a little chloroform, ammonia, benzole, or other suitable poison. The vapour will soon find its way through the pores of the pill boxes, but, in order to make its action speedy, each one should have a few perforations in the lid.
Whatever advantages this method may give to the collector who works at night, when the process of pinning would be more or less tedious, there is no necessity for its adoption during the day. The large number of pill boxes required is certainly far more bulky than the single collecting box that would accommodate all the day's captures; and although most of the insects boxed alive may be none the worse for the shaking they get, and may not damage themselves by fluttering in their small prisons, yet there is often a little loss on this score.
If you do adopt the pill-boxing method, be very careful that you do not mix the occupied boxes with the empties; and unless you fix on some definite plan for the prevention of such an occurrence, you will often find yourself releasing a prisoner from a box you have just opened to receive a new-comer.
Suppose that you start with all your empties in your right pocket. Then each one, as soon as it is tenanted, might be placed in the left, with the name of the insect, or any particular concerning it you would wish to note, pencilled on the lid.
When examining the trunks of trees you will be continually meeting with specimens of very small Moths—Pyralides, Crambi, Tortrices, and Tineæ—and at first may find some difficulty in boxing or bottling such small and delicate creatures. A grass stalk will enable you to tip some of them into your killing bottle, but some are so snugly packed in crevices of the bark that it is almost impossible to get them out without damage, even with a thin and slender stalk. But a sudden puff of wind from your mouth will often be sufficient to dislodge them and blow them into your net, and from this they are easily transferred to a box or bottle.
These few hints will prove sufficient to start you on moth-hunting expeditions during the daytime, and will enable you to make good use of the dull days and cloudy hours when the butterflies are quiet; but we must now turn our attention to the night work of the entomologist, and see how we may attract and catch moths during their hours of work and play.
Searching for Moths at Night.
It is a well-known fact that the night-flying moths are attracted by lights, a characteristic of these insects that it is difficult to explain. Their love of darkness is in many instances so decided that they absolutely refuse to take flight while the fading light of day still lingers on the horizon, and even display a great aversion to the rays of the moon; and yet these very same species will often rush madly into the fierce glare of a naked artificial light, or fly with an energy almost amounting to fury against the glass of a street lamp or lighted window.
Puzzling as this peculiar tendency is, we can profitably turn it to our own account by making it a means of luring a number of moths into our presence.