Clear-winged Striped Bee Fly
S2, Male, Flying, profile
Clear-winged Striped Bee Fly
S8, ventral
| Clear-winged Striped Bee Fly S2, Male, Flying, profile | | Clear-winged Striped Bee Fly S8, ventral | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Flies (Diptera) | ||||
| Family: | Bee Fly (Bombyliidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Clear-winged Striped Bee Fly (Villini sp ES01) | ||||
| This Photo: | S3, Flying, posterior | ||||
Thank you Dr Chris Lambkin for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA), the Adelaide Hills and elsewhere ~13.5mm long (of the 3 we've measure, they range from 13mm to 15mm long, so a fairly large fly). ~13mm wing length. There's a good chance there are multiple species represented here. Striped Bee Flies (tribe Villini) are very difficult to separate into genera. We have used wing colour to separate them into groups, which isn't particularly scientific, but a reasonable delineation until more taxonomic work is done to sort this group out. In the past we had these as Villa sp, but we then learnt there was also Exechohypopion sp. We had a go at separating one out, but Tony Daley very kindly explained the errors in the Australian taxonomy related to this group and that it's difficult to be sure a fly belongs to one genus or other; unless you can get to species in which case species characteristics are able to be used to go to that level. We strongly suspect we have a lot of undescribed species and generally from now on will be putting them in the Villini tribe, instead of the Villa genus. The males are quite territorial, so S2 here is probably a male. We think S14 is a female due to the fans of hair around her rear end (seen in the enlarged ventral photo). Chris agreed and said of S14 "yes female - those are acanthophorites - spoon shaped setae that the females use to gather sand into the sand chamber." We have since found the eyes are much closer together at the top for males compared with females; making it possible to separate the genders from a good dorsal head shot. | |||||
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