The Marches, Shropshire: For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique
Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.
In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.
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