Imperial Nursery - Year Six?

I thought that my days as a nanny to Emperor Moth caterpillars were over, after the spectacular run which followed the arrival of a magnificent female Emperor moth in the light trap on 7 May 2014, a year after we moved here. She is the one who heads the composite picture at the top of the blog, clinging to my then camera strap.

 But no.  I was putting the mattock away in our shed yesterday when I heard and then saw a tremendous fluttering of something considerably more weighty than a butterfly.

Penny and I were just off out to deliver emergency rhubarb to a neighbour but this mercy mission had to be postponed. I realised to my surprise and delight that the intruder was a male Emperor. After a brief chase, much cupping of hands and sliding into Tupperware boxes and the like, he sat still long enough for the photographs above.

If I had a real Imperial Nursery, they might make rather a good logo, suggesting an atmosphere of care and protection for my little charges.  But even with the time afforded by the lockdown, I am not sure that I want to have the responsibility for a big box of hawthorn gobblers again, so I carefully put the moth on some honeysuckle where he permitted me this third picture

There's a bit of an air of clinging-on for dear life about that one, and the poor insect probably was feeling rather shaken. I meanwhile returned to the abandoned rhubarb, pondering why a male Emperor moth should have come to our shed. Discussing it with P,  I hazarded that thanks to the building's extensive use as an Imperial Nursery in the last six years - see for example blog entries here and again here and yet again (with further links) here - there might still be female pheremones hanging about.  Emperor moth females famously emit these during their short lives and males  equally famously pick them up expertly, sometimes from more than a mile away.  Here's a couple of pictures from a post I did in April 2017 when we experimented with this so-called 'assembling' - monitoring a drowsy female on a sunny afternoon. Three males arrived out of nowhere and there were high jinks.

Recollecting this episode made me wonder about another option: my last season of breeding left me with quite a large box of cocoons. I distributed these to various people but I had a feeling that there had been some left. The moths can sometimes go without hatching for four years, even though they generally live for only a couple of weeks, partly because they cannot eat. What a life! (Though handy for us humans, if we didn't have to find food in the current lockdown).

Anyway, I went back to the shed to see if I could find any boxes with bits of old plant debris and - Lo and behold! On top of our stack of garden games, there was a big clear plastic one, and perching on it was this splendid Empress.

Although I am dubious about breeding Emperors and Empresses again, I cannot resist another go at 'assembling' later today, although this moth may have already mated with her brother. In that case, I gather, her allure may be reduced, but we shall see.  Meanwhile, they have each left me with neatly-holed cocoons from which they emerged yesterday.

A footnote to this is that iRecord, which I admire so much and which is giving me great pleasure, has a problem with moths due to database interfaces. I submitted the Emperors yesterday but got an automatic reply that they were 10km outside the moth's known area...