This stout fly landed on the empty top bar hive the other day. At first we thought it might be some type of bee or wasp, pretending to be a honey bee in order to sneak into the one of the hives for insidious reasons. On closer inspection, we wondered if it was a fly of some sort disguised as a bee for personal protection. (I certainly wouldn't eat a bee!)
In the end, a quick check of google revealed that it was indeed a fly. The big compound eyes, only one pair of wings (bees have two pairs), and no jointed antennae were apparently the big give aways. From the great Red Plant Inc website it looks like our visitor was a Syrphid fly or more specifically a Transverse Flower fly.......
BTW, the title of this post was Queenie's idea..... I'm not that smart.
Great picture! I tried to take pictures of flies before, but they flew away :)
ReplyDeleteIt was a pretty persistent fly - it just kept coming back to the same spot. It made life easy for us.
ReplyDelete