Another pollinator

This one is not a bee.

Syrphid fly on Queen Anne's Lace, Daucus carota.

The syrphids, or hover flies, sometimes mimic bees and wasps, but their antennae are short and stubby. A bee's antennae are longer, and elbowed. And, in proportion, the flies' eyes are larger than the bee's.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Y este no es una abeja. Es una mosca de los sírfidos, que comunmente se confunden con las abejas y avispas. Pero las antenas de las moscas, incluyendo los sírfidos, son muy cortas, sin ángulos. Las antenas de las abejas son más largas, y tienen una articulación muy obvia. Y, con respeto a su tamaño, los ojos de la tribu de las moscas son más grandes que los de las abejas.

Esta mosca está buscando su alimento en las flores de zanahoria silvestre, Daucus carota, conocida en inglés como "encaje de la Reina Ana".

Not so shy

This time of year, the Pacific dogwood blooms in our coastal woods. Startling, somehow; the large, showy flowers look like they belong in a residential garden, but here they are among the alders and Douglas firs of the forest edges.

Dogwood and stripy fly

The actual flowers are tiny, pale yellow or greenish-white, and shy. They have four yellow-tipped petals each. The 6 or 8 big "petals" are the bracts surrounding the flower head, like the ribbons and lace framing a bridal bouquet.

Pacific flowering dogwood, Cornus nutalli. 

On one bloom, a striped fly was hard at work, taking care of the pollinating.

Zooming in on that fly. Brown-eyed, yellow-striped. One of the many syrphid flies.

In summer, the trees will produce red berry clusters, not good to eat. And then they'll flower again in the fall.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

En esta temporada del año, aparecen en nuestros bosques las grandes flores del cornejo Pacífico, Cornus nutalli. Parece un árbol que se encontraría en un jardín residencial, pero este es un nativo, y se mezcla al azar entre los alisos y abetos de los bordes asoleados del bosque en la costa.

Las flores verdaderas se ven en el centro; los grandes "petalos" exteriores son en realidad hojas modificadas, o brácteas. Las florecitas son blancas con amarillo, de 4 pétalos. Me dan la impresión de un ramo de flores de una novia, rodeado de su marco de listones y encaje.

En una de las flores, una mosca negra con rayas amarillas estaba trabajando; estas están entre las principales polinizadoras.

En el verano, los árboles llevarán frutillas rojas; las comen los pájaros y los oso, pero nosotros no. Y en el otoño, habrá flores nuevas.

Critters, critters, critters

... collected from here and there, some alive, some recently dead. I'm sorting last month's photos, playing catch up.

Harvestman on a house plant (Kalanchoe tomentosa)

Hover fly on yarrow. I'm not sure of the other beetle with the spots. Tyee Spit.

Twin berries, Lonicera involucrata, with an orange fly. Tyee Spit.

A crane fly who died on my windowsill. Aren't those wings pretty?

Looking at you.

Grasshopper on the Oyster Bay shore. Probably Pallid-winged Grasshopper, Trimerotropis sp. Mostly, they jumped away as soon as my shadow came anywhere near; for this one, I crawled up, inch by inch, down at his level. (No shadow!)

Another Oyster Bay grasshopper, same afternoon, same location. But this one didn't wait around for me. He may be a different species, but I can't identify him, and the Pallid-wings are quite variable.

Recently squashed spider. Just the eyes and mustache. One of the mesh web weavers, by the eye arrangement. (See BugGuide)

Water shots next, I think.

Daisy whites

Sometimes it takes a little thing to point out how much we are polluting our environment. I stopped to take photos of daisies beside the highway north. They were covered in dust and pockmarked. Even the bees were dusty.

Then, high on the cliffs above Brown's Bay, 4 kilometres from the highway as the crow flies, I stopped at another daisy patch. Not a speck of dust in sight, even though the road (not frequently travelled, but still) was gravel and bare dirt.

Daisies and unidentified fly. As shot; no cleanup needed. No dust.

Daisy with syrphid fly.

Cropped from previous photo. I think that fly is transparent: I can see the individual florets of the daisy in the "yellow" stripes on the fly's abdomen. Again, no touch-ups needed.

One daisy, many buds. And another syrphid fly.

Dove or Eagle?

Around a picnic area at Lake Roberts, wild crimson columbine brightens the edges of the forest.

Aquilegia formosa, a perennial native to the west coast.

The flowers are edible and sweet; hummingbirds love the nectar collected in the long spurs. But the seeds are poisonous and the rest of the plant may be problematic. I don't think I'll try the flowers; it's enough just to look at them.

My guide says that "Haida children were told not to pick the flowers or it would rain." And since it will always rain sooner or later on this wet coast, the elders were sure to be proved correct.

The name, in Latin, means "beautiful eagle"; the common English name means "like a dove, or pigeon". I can see the eagle, but not the dove.

A style has gone a-wandering. And what's that bug?

A syrphid fly with big, burgundy eyes and yellow striped legs.

Mini-selfie

Hawkweed and stripy fly. Beach Grove:

And the mini-selfie, with camera, on the fly's back.

Everything's packed and lined up at the door, ready for the truck, Except the computer, my breakfast, and my toothbrush. And the tank. Shutting down the computer in a few minutes. Tomorrow, the ferry and Campbell River!

Serendipity

I had taken a wrong turn and was tangled in streets that curved away from where I wanted to be, and then dead-ended, when I passed a small sign at an opening into a brushy, weedy, dark ravine. "Al Cleaver Park," the sign said. It didn't look park-like, nor inviting, but I was fed up with driving in circles. I parked and went in.

Well. An old trail led along the edge of the ravine, down a hill, past weeds and trash, and ended up underneath the road I had been looking for. And there, where I never would have seen it in years of hurrying home, was a bright crop of Queen Anne's lace, dancing in the breeze.

With bugs, to boot.

Flower head, opening up. With soldier beetle.

Common aerial yellowjacket, Dolichovespula arenaria, I think.

Harmless Syrphid fly, pretending to be a big, bad yellowjacket.

Pair of soldier beetles doing what soldier beetles do.

"Hi, friends! Mind if I join you?"

The busy pair ignored him, and he wandered off alone.

I took too many photos, and I still haven't sorted them. I've still got a bunch of critters from the Serpentine Fens, etc. And I'm due a visit to the beach to collect hermit treats. I'll catch up one of these days!

Everything's hard at work ...

... and we're just idling along, watching them go at it.

Thimbleberry leaf, collecting sunlight to feed the berries.

Honeybee harvesting pollen. Note the fat pollen bags on her legs.

A small vetch (tufted vetch, maybe?) in a tangle of assorted weeds, enticing pollinators.

Syrphid fly on blackberry leaves. With grass and buttercup going to seed.

Blackberry flower, with two flying critters. Can you find the second?

Zooming in to see the shapes of the stamens (the pollen-bearing stalks) and the styles and stigmas (the short tubes that receive the pollen).

Yellow and orange fruiting bodies of a cup lichen on a tree trunk.

We were the only lazy ones there. Unless taking photos can somehow be construed as work.

Flower mimic fly

At our local nursery, Potter's, there is a long, sunny bench of ground cover plants, raised to easy viewing height. A swarm of yellow and black flies was buzzing around them, often standing still in the air, just under my nose. I couldn't resist them, and spent some time chasing them with my little pocket camera.

They were far too quick for me; I got dozens of photos of places where they had been a split second ago.

One finally parked on a green flower, and pretended to be part of it.

Green wings, brown wings

Blood-red eyes, and fly babies

Sorting photos from last year, I found several folders of still-unprocessed raw files. I've been plowing through these, and struck gold:

6 legs and 1000 eyes. (Or thereabouts.)

Syrphid, or hover fly.

These are from last July. In a later folder, of tiny critters holed up under rotting maple leaves, waiting out the cold snap, I found the next generation.

These are such pretty flies, but the larvae don't have any of the appeal of the adults. My photos are fuzzy; the larva was sopping wet, and I hadn't even seen it on the leaf until I was processing the photos. But I've looked them up on BugGuide and other places, and they don't get any better looking.

Spiky, splotchy, segemented larva. Eats aphids. Even in winter.

We're looking at it from the rear. Those pointed tubes at the back are its spiracles, or breathing tubes.

More discoveries to come...

Green-gold hover fly

Many of these were busy over flowers at the edge of White Rock beach last week.

Look at that green spotted eye!

Top view

I looked through 5,000 of BugGuide's photos of Syrphids last night, without finding them. There are only another 5, 215 to go.

Copycat flies

A clump of Michaelmas daisies in Beach Grove attracted a swarm of yellow and black insects this afternoon, honeybees and wasps, mostly. And a pair of lookalikes.

Syrphid fly. Eristalis tenax, a bee mimic.

Flies have only two functional wings. Bees have four.

Another syrphid. A bee mimic's mimic. Smaller, and with a striped vest instead of the furry one.

Flying jewels

This has been an oddly bug-free spring. A few bumblebees, a lonely spider or two, a stray mosquito, three or four carpet beetles; that's been all we've seen for a long time.

That has changed. The sunlight outside my window is bright with flying things, bees and wasps and a tiny moth. Down on the dunes, the ants are swarming, and cabbage moths led me a merry chase, without any luck, of course. Cleaning up the garden this afternoon, I woke a big, black beetle. The spiders are back in business. Good times are coming!

On the hydrangea, I found this syrphid fly, who obligingly posed for me just beyond where I could reach without danger of falling into the leaves.

In the sunlight, he glowed, especially that golden vest.

And I managed to get close enough to the clematis to catch this bee arriving.

I didn't know their wings bent when they were flying. No wonder they're so agile in the air!

The clematis, sans bee.

"Hello, world!"

I collected a bunch of leaves from the linden tree; each one has a larva or a pupa of some insect or other. Every day, I check to see what has pupated, or emerged from a pupa. This syrphid fly was still brand new, still drying his wings when I found him.

All new and shiny

Ready to go.

On his way out, he checks his hair in the mirror/window, and off he goes!

There are still two pupae to match his. two ladybug pupae, a few parasitized aphids, and something hidden under a tight web. And the larva of that green caterpillar, now in his chrysalis. Maybe one of these times I'll catch one at the moment of emergence. I'll post developments as they occur.

That's no bee!

This bee mimic was foraging on tiny thistles in the Reifel Island bird sanctuary.

A syrphid fly, probably*.

It's cheating: to simulate bees' antennae, it holds two legs out in front of its head. And it's about the size of a bee, and furry; any bird that skips bees will pass this one by, too.

A bee has four wings. A fly, like this one, has two. Birds aren't supposed to notice this.

Bees have nicely rounded abdomens; syrphid flies' bellies are so thin they look squashed. This one curves downward at the back, so it looks fat from a bird's eye view. From the side, however, the fakery is exposed; that belly is flat!

Notice the unusual shape of the wings; scalloped at the rear end.

I was fooled, too, at least until I got home and looked at the photos. I have advantages a bird doesn't, even with their superior eyes.

* A similar one, from Ontario is here, on BugGuide. Ours is probably in the same Subfamily, Eristalinae.