There are small patches of rosy plectritis around the arboretum. The easiest place to find them is in the wildflower garden right in front of the White Oak Pavilion. I checked out a patch up the creek trail and it was buzzing with pollinators, especially bee flies.
I love watching this fly as it moves from flower to flower. It has long legs and a long proboscis and it dances around a flower cluster quickly sipping nectar. It doesn’t really land on them. Its long legs will briefly touch the petals which seems to stabilize its position long enough to take a drink. I read that one reason that they have such long legs and proboscis is to keep their distance from a cluster of flowers that might have a predator like a crab spider waiting to grab them. It swiftly works its way around a cluster of plectritis flowers and then darts off to the next one. Occasionally, I will see them briefly rest on the ground or on vegetation near the ground.
Bee flies get their name from mimicking bees or wasps as a defense strategy, because predators want to avoid potential danger like a venomous stinger.
The larva of bee flies are parasitoid and will often target various soil-dwelling insects in their larval stage such as solitary bees, wasps, beetles, and grasshoppers. Bee flies hover above the ground looking for a burrow that one of these insects is making for its eggs. When the bee fly finds one, it hovers over the burrow and flicks its abdomen to launch an egg in the entrance. I would love to see this, but I am sure it happens at the blink of an eye. When the bee fly larva hatches in the burrow, it will feed on the host larva. The bee fly larva then pupates and stays inside to emerge the next spring as an adult.
Most of the time I will see the shadow of a bee fly on the ground as it hovers before I see it. Their wings have a high-pitched buzzy sound as they hover and dart around flapping their wings what sounds like a bajillion times a second. Sometimes they will hover right next to my head as I stand around watching them. I hoped that they weren’t looking to see if my ear canal was a place to flick an egg! I took a heap of blurry photos as I tried to capture a picture of one. In the end, I feel like I still never got a very crisp image. Maybe it’s because they are so fuzzy. Even with my own eyes these bee flies seemed out of focus. In the process of it all, I named this bee fly the Whirry Blurry bee fly.
