A harvest festival of ripe fruit and colourful butterflies

 Apples, pears and plums are ripening faster than we can eat them, so the bird table has been taken over by butterflies feeding on the fermenting juice of over-ripe fruit.

There were are least twenty red admirals and half a dozen comma butterflies getting legless on alcoholic fruit juice in this afternoon’s warm sunshine in the garden. When they are in such a lethargic, inebriated state butterflies are very easy to approach and if they do fly they settle again almost immediately.

Drinkers on the bird table ‘Last Chance’ saloon.

Comma butterflies on pears, a red admiral on a rotting apple, plus a bonus seven-spot ladybird that probably came to feed on the mould growing on the fruit.

Comma butterflies seem to have a particular liking for pear juice

A red admiral with its proboscis sunk deep in the hole left by a plum stalk, drinking sun-warmed plum juice

As sometimes happens, a fight broke out between drunkards when this red admiral and comma butterfly were competing for the same feeding cavity in a pear. Wing blows were exchanged and the comma prevailed. It seems even some butterflies can become aggressive if they over-indulge with alcohol, although most seem to just become semi-comatose, to the point where they’ll crawl onto your finger rather than fly away if you poke them.

The irresistible attraction of fermented plums

After a bumper plum harvest, the last few fallers have attracted a host of insects, including ......

...... bluebottles and greenbottles ........

....... hosts of these little vinegar flies (aka fruit flies) .....

...... a yellow fly with red eyes that might be a dung fly .....

..... and several of these lovely red admirals.

The Perils of Picking Over-ripe Plums

I learned the hard way that seemingly perfect ripe plums can be hollow on the side that you can't see when you reach up to pick them, and likely as not contain a feeding wasp, so these days I always wear gardening gloves when I pick them.

This is probably what wasps dream about, when the hard work of raising a brood is over ......

....... spending their dotage chewing their way through a sweet, juicy plum. I piled some on our bird table and after the last couple of days of warm weather they've begun to ferment, so the wasps are becoming woozy on alcohol and are very approachable. Sometimes they are so inebriated that they fall over on their backs if you give them a gentle shove; reminds me of my student days.

They  need to take frequent feeding breaks to clean sticky juice off their legs ....

.... and faces.

There are some pictures of some rather different inebriated insects on rotting plums here.

The Pulling Power of Plums

This year our Victoria plum tree has been laden with so many plums that they almost broke the branches off. There's only so many plums you can eat but they make excellent bait for attracting butterflies, like this red admiral.

The bloom on the skin of a plum is yeast, so the juice quickly ferments and the butterflies become inebriated and easy to photograph. I'm not sure if the wings of this one are drooping because it's sunbathing, or whether it's just drunk on alcoholic plum juice, but either way ...

... you can get very close to the butterflies in this soporific state. It's interesting to see how hairy they are.

Rotting plums piled on a bird table will attract red admirals, peacocks, small tortoiseshells and commas - and also wasps, so you need to keep a wary eye out for them.