I was on my way out to the supermarket this morning when I spotted this female Dotted Bee-fly in the front garden. Shopping immediately dropped to the bottom of my list of priorities, as I scuttled back inside for a camera. She wasn’t best pleased about being stalked, and got even crosser when she fell foul of a couple of foraging female Plumpies and was twice bounced off her chosen flower, but in the end she decided not to leave in a huff, and settled back down to feed.
Bee-flies are on the list of helpful insects which advertise their sex via the arrangement of their eyes: in males the eyes meet in the centre of the head, whereas in females they’re widely separated. You can just about see that here, I think, even though her head is well down inside the pulmonaria bloom, but in any case the female Dotted Bee-fly has a second tell, in the form of a line of white markings towards the apex of the abdomen. Because only the females have these marks, and I have a low mind, I’m unable to stop myself from thinking of them as a set of runway landing markers. Which in itself is a kind of mnemonic, I suppose.
R: L2, C8, D6.
