Will the Real Honey Bee Stand Up?

Will the real honey bee stand up?

Not all bees are honey bees and not all floral visitors that look like bees are bees. Sometimes they're flies.

A recent trip to the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road at the University of California, Davis yielded a variety of floral visitors.

They all took a'liking to the 8-foot-tall Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia), as orange as a Halloween pumpkin.

The floral visitors?

One was a drone fly (Ristalis tenax).

One was a sunflower bee (Svastra obliqua expurgata).

And one was a honey bee (Apis mellifera).

Scores of editors have mistaken drone flies and sunflower bees for honey bees and published photos that make entomologists cringe.

Entomologist/insect photographer Alex Wild of the University of Illinois (he received his doctorate in entomology at UC Davis with major professor Phil Ward), wrote an eye-opening piece on his Scientific American blog about mistaken insect identities. You'll want to read this--and then take a look at his amazing Myrmecos site.

And if you want to learn about insect photography from a master, be sure to attend his seminar from 12:10 to 1 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 26 in 122 Briggs Hall, UC Davis. His topic: "How to Take Better Insect Photographs."

And maybe he'll mention that Bees of the World book cover. The image is a fly.