Ruud Streefkerk

One day in the summer he stopped by. This Hornet Mimic Hoverfly has a yellow abdomen with thin black transverse stripes, a brown-orange shiny thorax and a yellow head. It resembles a bee or bumblebee, but it is a hoverfly. Until recently the insect was rare here, but with the warmer summers it is seen more and more often. It has a preference for an urban environment. The eggs are laid at the bottom of a wasp's nest and the larvae hibernate there when the wasps leave the nest, to pupate the following summer into a new generation of hoverflies. It grows larger (2.5 cm!) than most other species of hoverflies and, like all hoverflies, it lives on nectar and pollen. It cannot sting, but by size and colors resembles the Hornet, one of the most venomous insects. This advantageous resemblance to another species is called mimicry. Other hoverflies look more like small wasps because of their black-yellow stripes or bumblebees because of dense hair, but they all miss the slim ‘wasp-waist’ and fly with skittish movements.