Habitat and Host Plants
These moths can be easily seen in gardens, parks, meadows, bushes and woodland edge, where the preferred food plants grow (Honeysuckle, Red Valerian and many others).
Larvae usually feed on bedstraws or madders (Rubia) but have been recorded on other Rubiaceae and Centranthus, Stellaria, and Epilobium.
Adults are particularly fond of nectar-rich flowers with a long and narrow calyx, since they can then take advantage of their long proboscis and avoid competition from other insects. Examples of such plants include Centranthus, Jasminum, Buddleia, Nicotiana, Primula, Viola, Syringa, Verbena, Echium, Phlox, and Stachys. They are reported to trap-line, i.e. return to the same flower beds at about the same time each day.
Read more about this topic: Macroglossum Stellatarum
Famous quotes containing the words habitat, host and/or plants:
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.”
—Lucy Larcom (1826–1893)