The Finer Points.

As promised (or threatened) last Friday, I’m detailing the differences between a hoverfly and a honeybee.
 
We’ll start with puberty, unlike the fly, the bee is hairy, incredibly hairy, even its eyes are hairy. The hairs are branched and pick up an electric charge from friction with the air which makes them sticky – all the better for gathering pollen, the protein part of their diet.


The compound eyes themselves are small, the bee doesn’t need to evade predators, it has a better defence, the sting is in the tail as the saying goes; not only that, this bee cannot pass on its genes, it is just one small sterile component in a superorganism and its loss would be a trivial injury to the colony.
 
Difficult to see, particularly the third one, the three ocelli (simple eyes, similar in design to ours) don’t focus to form and image but are sensitive to both brightness and polarization and are used for navigation: the brightness enables them to control stability by measuring pitch, roll and yaw, while the polarization shows them where the sun is – even when it’s obscured.
 
The antennae are long, segmented and have a joint a third of the way along; they are very sensitive to smell for finding flowers, and for receiving communications using pheromones. This is why beekeepers use a smoker; forget the myth about reminding them of forest fires, the smoke masks the pheromones and so blocks the transmissions.
 
Not very obvious is the second pair of wings. In fact you can only just make out the edges of the right rear wing on each of these bees due to the magic of digital enhancement, They are not discernable on the left side. In flight, the front and rear wings velcroed together to give a larger surface area and, possibly, a surface with a controlled flexion
 
Thanks to Rainie for hosting the TinyTuesday challenge this week.