ONE OF THE BEE FLIES
(Sparnopolius fulvus, Wied.)
No butterfly or any other creature of the air could be more beautiful than this dream of early summer. The black velvet body, into which the sunlight sank and disappeared, the fringe of golden hairs along its sides, the steel gray, myriad-facet eyes of which its head was made, and the delicately formed wings, so thin that the light in passing through them was refracted into rainbow tints, made it seem to me more beautiful than almost any of those gorgeous forms of insect life which sometimes fill the clearings in Brazilian forests.
It does seem strange that such a thing as this should live its other life a parasitic grub within the larva of some caterpillar, or in the egg-case of some grasshopper; but so it seems to do. It spends its childhood as a disease, and its mating days as a dainty fly among the nectar-bearing flowers.
ANOTHER OF THE BEE FLIES
(Spogostylum simson, Fab.)
Where you see the carpenter bee you always see these bee flies waiting for the bee to go away from home. When the mother bee is out the female fly goes into the cell of the bee and lays her egg, and when her larva hatches out it eats up the bee’s larva.