Last night we spent a lovely couple of hours putting out moth traps and sugar solution ( a mix of molasses sugar, alcohol and fruit) onto tree stumps and painted onto cloth placed around the woods and garden. We were hoping to see lots of moths feeding on the sugar mix… Well we found all sorts of invertebrates… But moths were not abundant. We saw one moth ( just the one ) which flew off before we could take a picture.
The overriding theme of the night however, was hornets. Surprise, surprise hornets like sugar too! One of our sugar coated cloths obviously had attracted a number of invertebrates including a harvestman and earwig, but that is as much as I can tell you because the cloth seemed to be defended by hornets. We could not approach it without the hornets flying towards our light.
Having decided we had seen all we were likely to on the sugar we decided to take a quick look at the light traps we had set up around an hour earlier. The LED trap was working well, but the much brighter Robinson trap was, to our horror, full of hornets, at least 7 of them. Hornets in a trap will eat moths. So we decided to turn off the trap.
This morning we opened the Robinson moth trap with trepidation. It was still full of hornets…
We carefully removed the egg boxes from the trap putting the hornets away from us as we discovered them. Although the hornets were frightening to look at we were pleased to see that they ignored us. Despite the hornets we still had a good number of moths to record from the LED trap and even a couple of moths in the Robinson trap.
Later in the day we revisited the place the hornets had been protecting and discovered a hornet nest in an old gnarled silver birch. Which explained a lot.
