{"id":5239,"date":"2012-05-20T07:53:30","date_gmt":"2012-05-20T14:53:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=5239"},"modified":"2012-05-21T20:49:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T03:49:49","slug":"bee-or-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=5239","title":{"rendered":"Bee or fly?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A great deal of deception is perpetrated in the fields and woods:\u00a0camouflage, feigning,\u00a0mimicking. Fawns sport a dappled coat so as to vanish into the sun-flecked brush. Robins feign injuries to lure predators away from a nest. Flowers lacking nectar attract pollinators by mimicking flowers that deliver.<\/p>\n<p>The topic <em>du jour<\/em> is the common practice of some types of fly to mimic a bee. A year ago, I treated this same topic,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=264\">Telling bees from flies<\/a>,\u00a0with a more nicely matched pair of images. I now take another run at it using two pictures taken this last week.<\/p>\n<p>A bee has a good defence against a bird that would eat it: it stings. A fly is not similarly armed, but some adopt the survival strategy of looking as if they were: they masquerade\u00a0as a bee.<\/p>\n<p>Although many flies are remarkably good at such mimicry&#8212;good enough to fool birds&#8212;differences can be seen. Some are subtle and may not be obvious in the field: bees have four wings; flies only two. Others are easier to spot: flies have larger eyes and smaller antennae than bees. Below is a picture of a bee and a plausible look-alike.<\/p>\n<p>This is a bumble bee, a <em>Bombus vagans<\/em> (I think). It has long antennae and smallish eyes. This one has alighted on forget-me-nots and is using its tongue to sip nectar.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5241\" onclick=\"return false\" onmousedown=\"return false\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/bombusvagans120519as.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This is a fly, one of the hoverflies in the genus,\u00a0<em>Criorhina<\/em>. Its eyes occupy a much larger portion of the head than do those of the bee. Indeed, this male&#8217;s eyes almost touch in the middle of the head. (The particularly large eyes of the male help it to find females). The fly cannot hide is enormous eyes, but it has an interesting way to compensate for its vanishingly small antennae, and it demonstrates it in this picture. The fly will extend its forelegs and wave them about in a simulation of the constantly probing antennae of bees.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5240\" onclick=\"return false\" onmousedown=\"return false\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/criorhina120518s.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; A great deal of deception is perpetrated in the fields and woods:\u00a0camouflage, feigning,\u00a0mimicking. Fawns sport a dappled coat so as to vanish into the sun-flecked brush. Robins feign injuries to lure predators away from a nest. Flowers lacking nectar &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=5239\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bugs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5239"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5247,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5239\/revisions\/5247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}