Today I had a little excitement. I was glad to finally see a bumble bee just sit still on a leaf so that I could try to get decent images of its back, face, and basitarsi for identification purposes. I was so glad, in fact, that it barely registered that a bumble bee was not behaving in the usual manner. Instead of efficiently moving from flower to flower it was just standing on a leaf of one of my paw-paw trees. I jumped to the conclusion that since it was so hot, maybe bees just needed to sit and hang out for a while on days like this. They're hairy and insulated, after all. That's what enables them to get up at the crack of dawn and get to work on cool spring mornings.
Hours later in another location I saw another bumble bee doing the same thing and I went in with the camera for all the angles I could get once again. It was only later when I was cropping the images and getting a closer look that I thought "Wait a minute. That's an awfully fat foot for a bumble bee. And look at those eyes...and antennae...Well, I'll be. That's a fly."
I'm going to go read up on Batesian mimicry now, grateful for today's educational experience.
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