Here’s a thread in praise of the magnificent hive-mind of the Afterword. Whatever your query, there’s always some one in this community who will have an interesting, useful comment.
You name it. Ornithology, archaeology, tautology, astronomy, gastronomy,
Soviet Movies, punk-rock B-sides, Byzantine history, Icelandic fiction, Latvian poetry, Albanian sit-coms….
We’ve got a lovely bunch of polymaths. Here they are a standing in a row.
Introducing Hemaris fuciformis. A.k.a .the Broad-bordered Bee Hawk-moth.
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I was walking along Nissastigen, the street where we live, at 9.00 this morning enjoying the fragrance of the splendid jasmin bush just outside our door when I noticed a very esoteric little beastie, not a bee and not quite a butterfly, tucking into the pollen with a vengeance.
I was fascinated, so I took some photos and posted them on Insta and Facebook because I thought it was a rather splendid creature.
In next to no time, that true Son of Linnaeus, Hubert Rawlinson, informed me it was Broad-bordered Bee Hawk-moth.
What’s more I learnt in 1758, Linnaeus himself had observed the creature and given it the Latin name Hemaris fuciformis.. That gave me a wonderful feeling of belonging to a tradition.
Any other members of the LINNAEUS FAN CLUB
Though point of order @Kaisfatdad the ‘jasmine bush’ in your photograph is in fact Mock Orange possibly the variety Philadelphus lewisli
Ooooops. I was talking to one of my neighbours, who was picking a few blossoms from the bush, and asked her what the bush was. She told me it was jasmine.
Fool that I am, I had great faith that the Swedes knew everything about the birds and the bees. How wrong i was. The true spirit of Linnaeus is alive and well and living in Yorkshire.
Most of you aren’t on social media so here are some photos of that fragrant bush.
And here is Hemaris fuciformis on the job
it’s rather like a tiny humming bird
I trap and record moths, they are fascinating beasties from the tiny mint moths to the huge eyed hawk moths they are under-appreciated beautifully marked insects that have such a bad press compared to their day flying cousins butterflies. I’m approaching 250 species trapped and identified in my garden over a five year span.
@neil-dyson I’ve seen lots of elephant hawk-moth photographs recently has it been a good year for them?
My wife likes also to “trap” moths, or rather, likes me to, on her behalf, such is her dislike of their dusty parts.
It’s currently prime flying season for them and I’ve had 2 or 3 present each time I had the trap out last month.
Thanks.
250 species. That is very impressive, Harry.
I Googled and discovered that someone who is interested in moths and butterflies is a lepidopterist.
One big surprise for me was seeing a moth out in the daytime collecting pollen.
It seems that they pollinate as much as butterflies.
https://theconversation.com/moths-do-the-pollinator-night-shift-and-they-work-harder-than-daytime-insects-138472
At first glance yesterday, Hubert thought that my wee beastie was a hummingbird hawk moth.
Another gorgeous moth that he knows about..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummingbird_hawk-moth
Just to point out I know some moths and plants etc but I had to rely on Google lens and plant plantnet to help with identification.
And why on earth not?
I just wanted to point out I’m not an expert in lepidopterology or botany.
Maybe not, @hubert-rawlinson. But you do obviously know which questions to ask and where to ask them.
Can’t help thinking about my school days where we had to memorize an enormous number of facts. A lot of that seems superfluous now.
Learning facts is propositional knowledge – a term I learned earlier this morning, from this Substack article explaining that AI will take over that from us, and we should develop the other 4 fingers of knowledge, which AI cannot dominate:
https://open.substack.com/pub/ecologiesofwisdom/p/death-of-a-knowledge-system