Butterflies are nectar feeders and require frequent access to the sugars and amino acids that nectar provides. How do they find the flowers and inflorescences that provide them with nectar, and how do they locate the nectar once they have arrived at a flower? Butterflies may be specialists, i.e. visiting only one, or a few…
Adult butterflies feed on a variety of fluids, including nectar, water, damp substrates (mud), rotting fruit, excrement and so on. The term ‘mud puddling’, or just puddling, is usually used to describe any sort of feeding that is not nectaring, i.e. feeding on flowers. Male butterflies in particular need to stock up on sodium and…
When I first saw this pair of Wood white butterflies in Spain, I did not realise that they were mating, i.e. in copula, as they were at right angles to each other. But it soon became apparent as I took a series of photographs highlighting both the male and female. The sexes can be told apart…
The butterfly proboscis (plural: proboscides) is an exquisitely evolved instrument for exploiting sources of nectar at the base of flowers. In fact it has evolved in concert – co-evolution – with the flowers it relies on for sustenance, so not surprisingly the length of the proboscis is usually correlated with the depth of the corolla tube of…
The Black-rimmed snout hoverfly, Rhingia campestris Meigen, 1822 (Diptera: Syrphidae) is a common and widespread fly which is often seen visiting flowers or resting on nearby vegetation. The larvae live and develop in cow dung, whilst the adults feed on nectar and pollen. Pollen is required by the females as a protein source for egg development;…
Since it’s Bees Needs week, I thought that I would put together a blog about bees using photographs I have taken recently in Scarborough and Spain. Taking photographs of bees is fun, but it is a bit of a hit and miss process and you need to take quite a lot of shots to get…
Ray Cannon's nature notes 