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)
“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host...But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 14:8,10.
“The holly and the ivy
Are plants that are well known
Of all the trees that grow in the woods
The holly bears the crown.”
—Unknown. The Holly and the Ivy (l. 1–4)