During an expedition to Bonaire, my gaze tried to follow a bird that flew inimitably fast from flower to flower, hovered for a fraction of a second to drink nectar from it and then disappeared again. I only knew it had to be a hummingbird – very small, American birds belonging to the family Trochilidae – because I know the same behavior of a butterfly.
Beak
the hummingbird butterfly, Macroglossum stellatarum, is so called because, like these birds, this insect is able to hang still in front of a flower to suck nectar from it. He does this with his long rolling tongue, which looks a bit like a beak when drinking. The literal meaning of Macroglossum is therefore ‘long tongue’. This allows it to drink well from hard-to-reach, deep flower tubes, although it also likes other flowers with a lot of nectar. As a caterpillar, it is a bit more picky. One of his preferred plants is madder, rubia tinctorum, which is the origin of another Dutch name for this species: madder butterfly. But bedstraw, Galiumhe likes it too.
People who have ever tried to photograph a hummingbird butterfly know that this is not easy. Just when you have focused and want to print, the grey-brown animal with orange hind wings has already left and zoomed to the next flower. Because of that agile flight behavior, it is also called agitation butterfly or unrest. Or perhaps that term comes from the unease aroused in some by the audible hum resulting from the lightning-fast wing beat.
Once a hummingbird butterfly has found rich nectar flowers, it stores that place in its memory and returns to it every day. That seems stable, but it is still known as a migratory butterfly. Usually this species winters in southern Europe and flies all the way north to reproduce here. It is doing this more and more en masse, which means that it is now a very common day-flying moth.
Traveling far away is no longer necessary for him. He also feels at home here now
And now that the winters have been increasingly mild in recent years, they sometimes crawl into barns, in attics or in hollow trees in our regions at the end of the season. Traveling far away is no longer necessary for him. He also feels at home here now. In fact, it is so at ease that, to the surprise of many, it frolic around early spring bloomers at the first rays of the sun.
He also likes to do this in gardens. And that means that this cheerful butterfly is seen a lot, especially in warm, dry years. The typical flight behavior clearly appeals to many people, judging by the frequency with which the species has been nominated for the election ‘Insect of the Year’. But he can’t participate. If butterflies and other cuddly insects were allowed to participate, candidates such as the wood cockroach, Ectobius sylvestrisand the beaver beetle, Platypsyllus castoris, do not get the attention that the election is trying to arouse for them. To make up for it a little, I’ll give him a little attention here. Insect of the year 2023 was the toilet moth mosquito on Saturday (Clogmia albipunctata).