Blausternchen
27.10.2026, 18:22
How can you tell whether a hoverfly is a female or a male? I zoomed in on the head of the dung bee (also known as the false bee or wedge-spotted hoverfly). In hoverflies, males have larger eyes that meet in the middle. So the dung fly is a male. In females, the eyes are clearly separated. In Photo 4, the grove hoverfly is a female, as is the one in Photo 5, which is either the small or large hoverfly (I’m not exactly sure which one it is—they’re very difficult to tell apart). I’m not sure if this distinction can also be made for the blowfly (Photo 6) and the fly Spaonia subventa (Photo 7); these are not hoverflies. Photo 8 shows a common harvestman, and Photo 9 shows a German wasp—one of the two pesky wasp species; there are about 600 other wasp species, which we pay much less attention to...
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