Author Gary Taylor â—¦
From several metres away, as some zipped from flower to flower while others, typical of some male bees, seemed to hover territorially over “their” patch, for a moment I thought I might have found another “new” bee species for the albums… 🙂 But no, that shape, the skinny legs and those eyes tell me it’s most likely the “Bee mimicking wasp” Bembix. Ok, “Bee mimicking” isn’t so much an official title as a personal one 😄, but there’s a few that bare a striking resemblance and often get mistaken for bees… And you might ask, “Why would a wasp mimic a bee?… can understand a harmless creature like a bee mimicking a scarier one, like a wasp, for defence, but…”. Well, Bembix wasps are the “Green Beret” of the high speed predators that snatch their prey from out of the air… they make soldier flies and robber flies look like boy scouts and petty thieves… 😅 And what better camouflage could you want as a carnivorous predator than to look like a harmless “herbivore”… Imagine a cow-mimicking bear 😆, looks like a cow, acts like a cow, but when a sheep turns up, it’s on it like lightning, dragging it’s carcass away to it’s den to feed it’s “calves”… 😂
Or, maybe you won’t ask ‘cos this whole idea of “mimicry” is a load of bollocks, purely a typical “human” perception akin to finding faces, or animals, in clouds and rock formations… “looks like…” 😃 but in reality, given that bees and wasps both stemmed from a common ancestor and evolved into many thousands of individual species under the same conditions over millions of years, surely, logically, it would bee statistically unlikely if a few didn’t evolve/adapt similar features… 😄
Anyway, believe what you like, I still favour my childhood theory that they are actually alien spy pets monitoring our planet… 😆 Hey, I grew up with Martin the Martian, Dick Tracey and Lost in Space… 😂 So, here, I either have the female with two partial bands and the male with four (5th pic shows the reasoning), or I have pics of both the earlier model Bembix YY 5000 and the newer Bembix XY 5000 😂, but I do love those blue visual receptors… 🙂💕
Geraldton, Midwest WA © Gary Taylor
Check out more blogs and contribution by Gary Taylor