During the glowing season you may also find male glow worms and maybe females by looking under stones, bits of wood and so on. But bear in mind that the larvae may well not be in the same area as the females. They are more likely to be around the undergrowth, whereas the adult females make their way into an open area where they can be seen by the males. (Human behaviour is much the same!)
Not really. I do get occasional reports of fireflies from the UK,
but the sad fact is that we don't get fireflies in this country, though
I wish we did. Fireflies are a different species from glow worms,
though
they are both members of the same overall family. The closest to
Britain
that fireflies are seen is Belgium.
Fireflies glow while they are flying, but glow worms just sit where they are and glow, though female fireflies may not actually fly but just sit there and wait for the males to find them, just as the glow worms do. Sometimes people talk of fireflies and actually mean glow worms, which remain static.
If your colleague saw apparently glowing insects flying around, it's most likely that they were actually ordinary night-flying insects of some sort illuminated in a beam of light from something – maybe a security light. You see much the same sort of thing when driving at night and moths suddenly seem to light up in the headlamp beam.
There is a Thomas Hardy book – I think it may have been Return of the Native – in which a group of men are playing with dice on the heath as it gets dark. Finding that they can’t finish their game, they hit on the idea of collecting glow worms. After a few minutes they have found a dozen or so, and can continue their game.
Two things emerge. One, they seem to think it is a novel idea to do this; and two, it takes them several minutes even in Dorset in the 19th century to find even a dozen. This suggests that glow worms, and the idea of using them for a light, were not very common.
Occasionally elderly people say that when they were young they used glow worms in their cycle lights, and I was told of one chap who got hauled up before the judge for doing this. However, he did get booked, possibly because the law requires a certain wattage of power in a cycle light!
Gilbert White, writing in the 18th century, only briefly mentions glow worms, and not in the context of giving light, so one assumes that they didn’t have this purpose.
I also feel that glow worms give off so little light that you would need an awful lot of them to get any useful illumination. If they were common, you could probably get enough to fill a whole jar with them and they might give you enough light to read a letter by, but I don't believe they were ever that common. Probably if someone did collect enough for that purpose, there would not be enough of them in the same place in subsequent years to be able to repeat the experiment!
So, from the above, I believe that in general they were not
widely used
for illumination. But it is a very interesting question, and maybe you
can find out more.
Following the last glaciation, species gradually
recolonised Britain
as
conditions improved for them. The subfossil evidence suggests
that
the
ranges of individual species ebb and flow in response to
climatic
change, so
glow worms would have spread north and uphill as conditions
made
this
feasible. But once people started to fragment the natural
landscape,
and
create vast sweeps of inhospitable land, populations have
become
increasingly fragmented and isolated, and prone to local
extinction
with
little hope of recolonisation.
Of course, accidental introductions are possible,
albeit unlikely
– a viable
population needs to be established, which is more difficult
for
a beetle
like the glow worm than it is for many other species, eg New
Zealand
flatworm or some of the exotic slugs and snails. Attempts to
introduce
glow
worm to Ireland have failed, which must indicate something!
I strongly suspect that records for the "lesser glow
worm" Phosphaenus
hemipterus have been the result of casual introductions which
have
failed
after a few years. The most recent record was associated with
a
dump of
building rubble to help drainage along a track - the
glow
worms could have
been present in cavities within the bricks etc and been moved
with
the
material. Certainly all records for this species have been
one-offs,
with no
subsequent sightings.