Friday, October 07, 2005

Flower flies


Flower flies, those tiny imitators, don’t look at all like the familiar house fly, instead they look like bees; with a disguise of yellow and black stripes.

They fool birds that avoid them for fear of being stung although they are innocuous.

Like the bees they imitate, many of them are good pollinators. Who would have thought that flies could be so pretty and so useful!


Some of them go a step further on their usefulness and eat a large number of aphids while they are larvae. Here