Larval food plant Hop. Did Someone have too much beer?
Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2025 4:55 am
Larval food plant Hop
Please can we have fully documented video life cycles of butterfly (and moth) species that use this plant?
From notes, apparently that was definitely Comma, possibly Peacock and Red Admiral, even rumours of Holly blue and even Brown Argus?
We want to understand more about Hop, that I thought was basically a deciduous climber with a vigorous creeping root that might have been divided to root in another location.
An allotment boundary fence was considered a suitable place for it to climb, by a least one Tennant who liked the pretty flowers and what might be seasonally collected on both sides of the fence, for making something else.
I understood that there might have been varieties, specifically grown for beer making (many flowers) and other, possibly more leafy varieties, that might have been more "evolutionarily" associated with our slowly evolving species or sub species.
The plant's characteristic, being a deciduous perennial (loosing it's leaves in winter and coming back from root base the following season) might have meant that it was less suitable than nettles to overwinter a Red Admiral larva, reacting in a way, to curl a nettle leaf, around itself for non gregarious (not huddling together) shelter warmth.
#HopTrefoil (flower shape might have looked superficially similar to something else, if not size).
"Cheers my Dears"
Please can we have fully documented video life cycles of butterfly (and moth) species that use this plant?
From notes, apparently that was definitely Comma, possibly Peacock and Red Admiral, even rumours of Holly blue and even Brown Argus?
We want to understand more about Hop, that I thought was basically a deciduous climber with a vigorous creeping root that might have been divided to root in another location.
An allotment boundary fence was considered a suitable place for it to climb, by a least one Tennant who liked the pretty flowers and what might be seasonally collected on both sides of the fence, for making something else.
I understood that there might have been varieties, specifically grown for beer making (many flowers) and other, possibly more leafy varieties, that might have been more "evolutionarily" associated with our slowly evolving species or sub species.
The plant's characteristic, being a deciduous perennial (loosing it's leaves in winter and coming back from root base the following season) might have meant that it was less suitable than nettles to overwinter a Red Admiral larva, reacting in a way, to curl a nettle leaf, around itself for non gregarious (not huddling together) shelter warmth.
#HopTrefoil (flower shape might have looked superficially similar to something else, if not size).
"Cheers my Dears"