Well. What can I say, other than thank you! I’ve been quite overwhelmed by all the lovely comments, stars, and hearts bestowed on yesterday’s milestone blip, and I’m truly grateful to everyone who responded. Many thanks to you all.
The heatwave broke today, with overcast skies and a temperature of 26°C – though the forecast rain, which we desperately need, didn’t arrive. In normal times 26° would be enough to keep me under cover, but after the heat of the past few days it felt positively balmy, so I decided to risk heading over to Trench Wood to look for invertebrates. There were plenty around, and I came home with a ridiculous number of photos, but the stars of the show were the lesser hornet hoverflies (Volucella inanis), which have recently emerged and today were out in force.
I don’t know which bright spark named this hoverfly, but I’d like a word with them, because “inanis” means empty, hollow, vain, or worthless – all of which convey a sense of negativity that I really don’t feel the poor creature deserves. At almost 15mm in length, Volucella inanis is one of our biggest and most spectacular hoverflies. Its cousin Volucella zonaria, the hornet hoverfly, is a tad bigger, but has very similar markings, and I still find it embarrassingly easy to confuse them in the field. V. zonaria is darker though: its thorax is chestnut brown and black, its scutellum and T2 markings are chestnut, and it has heavy black markings on the underside of its abdomen. V. inanis is generally paler, with yellow abdominal stripes, an orange scutellum, and a black and orange thorax, and the underside of its abdomen is largely yellow, with small black markings. Females of both species lay their eggs in the nests of social wasps, though V. zonaria will also lay in hornets’ nests; the hoverfly larvae scavenge among the debris on the floor of the nests, helping to keep them clean and free of disease.
I couldn’t quite decide between this fairly conventional view of V. inanis, and the more unusual one in the extra, so I decided to post them both. It’s not outwith the bounds of possibility that I’ll change my preference at some point, in which case I’ll swap them around.
