Subject: what’s this bug?
Geographic location of the bug: Houston, Texas.
Date: 11/08/2017
Time: 10:53 AM EDT
They love flower juice.
How you want your letter signed: Tan Doan
Dear Tan,
These are Flower Flies or Hover Flies in the family Syrphidae. Many members of the family mimic bees and wasps to help deter predators. Adults are beneficial pollinators and larvae eat Aphids and other small detrimental insects found on plants.
The day before yesterday I was sitting in the garden of a coffee bar in San Francisco with a friend of mine. A flower fly that looked very much like the fly in this photo kept circling his chicken sandwich, but Frank was sure it was a bee with an attitude. I could see it was some sort of syrphid fly—I collected insects when I was a kid—but a bee-sized flying insect with a striped behind is and always will be a bee from Frank’s point of view. I mention this little story not only because of the coincidence, but because one of the reasons I read your site is that I’ve become interested in how people perceive the insects they encounter.
I don’t know if any hoverfly species are predacious as adults, but I think that generally they are just flower-feeders. Does anyone even check the slightly older posts?
We meant to write “pollinators” and because we were thinking too far into the sentence, we accidentally wrote “predators” which should have referred to the larvae and not the adults. Thanks for catching our error which we have now corrected.