Emperors are go

I have often described my six years of adventures with Emperor moths here as a saga, which you might think a bit of an exaggeration. But the now-huge family established by the lone Empress which came to my light trap in May 2014, our first full Summer on the edge of Oxford, has been pretty good at story lines.

The latest generation is no exception. I decided to have a go at 'assembling' with the newly-hatched female I described in my last post, although I realised that she might already have done the business with her male companion. So she stayed the night and on Friday morning, I popped her under one of those wire butter cloches, like an upturned sieve with some sprigs of hawthorn for company.

In my experience, female Emperors are reluctant to move at all in the daytime, but I wanted to protect her from birds, in particular the highly inquisitive robin, left, whose territory seems to include both our shed and the garden table where I usually mull over the morning's catch. As the day moved on, chilly, a bit damp and uninviting, there was no sign of any suitors, so I took off the 'lid' and she perched on the side of the plastic box, very much in what we humans might see as a 'Come and get me' pose.

No luck; but Saturday was sunny and as the afternoon went on, with Penny and myself beavering away at lockdown vegetable growing, it began to get quite warm. Amid the fluttering Orange-tip and Brimstone butterflies, I suddenly saw something bigger, brownish and more muscular jink past.  Ah-ha, I thought. We are in business. And we were.

Like John Donne's lovers in The Ecstasy, the pair spent a long time quietly together before separating,  still companionably, below, and the male took his leave at about 6pm. I left the Empress in the shed and lit the trap for the night, planning to see next morning whether she had laid any eggs.

Come the morning, curiosity had me looking at the moth trap's contents first; and what caught my eye straight away but the tip of an Emperor moth wing. There in the eggboxes was a large Empress and beside her, a clutch of large eggs.

And that wasn't the end of this Downton Abbeyish episode.  I went on to the shed and found my original Empress gone. But on the mesh of the cloche were two clutches of much smaller eggs, below. 

Interestingly, as Penny pointed out when I showed her these photos, they seem to have a sort of glue which has stopped them slipping through the gaps in the mesh.

Was the Empress in the trap the same one as my original? I don't know, although she is still in the shed where her presence alerted another male in the sunshine yesterday afternoon, although he merely whizzed round the garden a couple of times and did not visit her. Is she the mother of all three clutches?  Again I don't know.  And what will she do next? She is sleeping now exactly where she was yesterday evening and did not visit the trap during the night. Whatever next?