4. Sepsidae – suum cuique

15th February 2019 – The Year of the Fly

A sunny day in February in Scotland is not to be ignored, so I was easily persuaded to take a break from whatever it was I should have been doing to go and spot a North American sea duck overwintering amongst thousands of its less exciting, merely Arctic, cousins. There were waders on the mudflats, raptors on the saltmarsh, and divers, grebes and ducks out at sea. In the clear water just beneath the rocky outcrop where we were gazing out over the wave-less sea, a solitary razorbill was swimming back and forward, popping up for a second and diving down again.

Scrambling along the foreshore took us down to water level where a volunteer on the Nature Reserve was picking up what little plastic debris had washed into the sandy bay. A tangle of wrack had a few specks of aberrant white wrapped up in it, but otherwise she had little work to do. I on the other hand, scenting riches, and having had the forethought to put a collecting tube in my pocket, got down on my haunches and prodded at the line of dark rotting seaweed. There was movement in the innards, dark shapes flitting a few feet and delving back into the darkness. Slightly surreptitiously, since I knew that collecting on the reserve was forbidden and I wasn’t sure if this extended to the foreshore, I prodded again. But without a net it was hard to catch anything, and in any case the flies kept low to the ground, eager to get back into their briny substrate. Eventually I managed to pot a straggler, and later we saw the lost duck, so all parties were happy.

This wasn’t a very pretty fly – spiky with bristles, and an odd triangular-shaped head with antennae perched at the tip, looking like ill-fitting nose-plugs. Perhaps the concept of a pretty fly is alien to you – but there are some that are beautifully striped, iridescent or metallic, elegantly slim-waisted or pleasingly obese. Their wings might have perfectly placed crisp spots or dreamy marbling, the veins perversely branching or matter-of-fact simple. On other fly-candy, long evenly spaced bristles march down the thorax in perfect pairs, or their antennae are evenly sized whorls bristling like pine trees, fashion-conscious legs distorted into weird shapes. But even I struggle to exclaim over this one. It’s even an orphan from another family (Coleopidae), now more or less on its own in the Sepsidae, where it goes by the name of Orygma luctuosum.

Maybe it was best left skulking in the seaweed, though arguably it was more interesting than a distant view of a dark duck with a white patch on its head. “Suum quique” as my father used to say – to each their own; or perhaps “De gustibus non est disputandum” – in matters of taste there can be no dispute. No-one could doubt that it was a lovely day for February.

3. Anisopodidae – the honey trap

February 2019 – The Year of the fly

Instead of paying proper attention to flies, I have been distracted – for the last couple of decades at least – by honeybees. Finding ourselves in a country cottage with a bit of garden and neighbours sufficiently far away not to be annoyed by troublesome livestock, we acquired, or rather were given, first chickens and then bees. One hive became two, two became ten, the beekeeping paraphernalia expanded until it required its own shed, and honey production became a cottage industry.

Over the years I have tried different ways of harvesting the honey – initially just eating the honeycomb straight from the hive for minimum fuss and maximum flavour, all the better for being home-grown. Then for a few years I began spinning it out from combs in a hand-cranked centrifuge, almost an industrial process involving complete takeover of the kitchen that dragged on towards bedtime, and I would become hot and grumpy from the work, everything and surface become sticky with honey. Now I harvest the honey in the autumn and store it as honeycomb until I need it, when I melt it out of the combs in an old chest freezer powered by a 60W bulb. The mixture of honey and wax is then sieved into a big bucket and decanted into jars, all in a relatively unstressful manner, with very little honey ending up on the kitchen floor. Between extractions the honey buckets sit in the bee shed along with all the other beekeeping bits and pieces, their lids slightly ajar to stop them going fousty.

The most frequent visitors to the bee shed are wasps, trying to put up nests on the roof in the spring and a nuisance in the autumn when unguarded boxes of honey are too much of a temptation for them. Otherwise, there is a colony of lesser wax moths (Achroia grisella), a lurking menance of mice, and occasional forays by the garden robin. And this morning, unexpectedly, in the bottom of the honey bucket there was a single dead fly, drawn to its doom by the lingering smell of honey.

Not the most glamorous of flies, but pleasingly easy to place in its family with only five questions to answer. 1. Does it have wings? (Yes!) 2. Are there more than three segments to the antennae? (Yes, 16 to be precise) 3. Is there a V-shaped crevice on the thorax? (No – it looks smooth).

From http://drawwing.org/insect/sylvicola-wing

4. Does the wing have a discal cell? Now, don’t be scared – a cell is just a bit of the wing completely surrounded by veins, and the discal cell is the one marked “d” on the wing diagram. And lastly, 5. Does vein R4+5 split into two? (No). So it’s a member of the family Anisopodidae, which happens to have only four British species, the larvae of one of which (Anisopus fenestralis) are “reported as causing damage to honeycombs …” by my trusty Coyler and Hammond “Flies of the British Isles”. The pattern on the wings look just right for that species. I wonder if they took up an interest in bees here at the same time that I did.

2. Chironomidae – dancing for joy

January 2019 – The Year of the Fly

Midges have a bad press in Scotland, the cause of much summer irritation on what should otherwise be blissful balmy evenings. But there are also non-biting midges with unthreatening mouthparts that are incapable of irritating anyone. Mid-January, when little else was stirring, I came across a hardy band of them taking advantage of a slither of low sun and the protection of the lane to dance ephemerally. With a flourish of the net I ploughed through them and extracted an unlucky individual for my laurel pot. My secret is out – I kill flies.

The “how” of this harks back to my boyhood when I was first introduced to the power of laurel leaves. In those days I had to walk a mile or so to the nearest supply, but now I can just hop the garden fence to the estate woods where they linger as evidence of the planned shrubbery and genteel walks. I was taught to remove the tips and stalk, fold the leaves about the midrib and snip them with scissors into 1mm slices. Squash them in a pot, cover over with a piece of tissue paper, and the killing jar is complete. Depending on the size of the fly, in a few seconds the fly succumbs, though it’s best to leave them an hour or two to prevent unwanted resurrections.

The “why” is more difficult. For insects like moths and butterflies, and indeed some flies, you can identify them easily from a photograph. But for many flies this is impossible since you need to know how many segments there are in the antennae or palps, which way the bristles on the head point or whether there is a bend in a particular vein in the wing. A pinned specimen is necessary, as is a good microscope, and so I have become more heartless than most in the killing of flies. Or perhaps I worry about it too much – most people wouldn’t give a thought to whacking one with a thoughtless hand. Not William Blake who was inspired by a summer cousin of my unfortunate chironomid:

Little Fly / Thy summer’s play, / My thoughtless hand / Has brush’d away.

Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not thou / A man like me?

For I dance / And drink & sing; / Till some blind hand / Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life / And strength & breath; / And the want / Of thought is death;

Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, / Or if I die.

Who then had I murdered? A shockingly green gentleman sporting Christmas tree antennae, a hunched back with crisp black go-faster strips, and a tangle of angular legs, the greenest thing about that day, a dancing, joyous thing. A chironomid.

1. Trichoceridae – ice house

1st January 2019 – The Year of the Fly

This is among other things, the “Year of the Fly” (http://yearofthefly.org/), and so, revisiting a boyhood interest that has now been on ice for four decades or more, I thought it would be fun to see how many of the more than 100 families of flies present in the UK I could find this year. The flies I mean are the two-winged flies that are members of the order Diptera, though just to confuse things, some have dispensed with wings altogether and cling onto the backs of bees, bats, birds and beasts.

The first of January might not seem like the best day to go looking for flies – but I knew where I would find some whatever the weather. Through the woods at the bottom of our garden is an ice-house, a left-over from the days when the surrounding area was somewhat grander with its mansion-house, stables, walled garden and, to keep things fresh since there was no refrigeration, an ice-house.

It’s a stone-built cylinder with a domed roof and a short entrance that used to have a door. In the winter ice would be brought in from the river, or possibly from specially created ponds nearby, and thereafter used as a cold store or source of ice. Nowadays, there is no ice inside, even in the depths of the winter, which makes it a good place to hibernate for herald moths (Scoliopteryx libatrix) which prefer the ceiling, leaving the walls to the spiders and multitudes of winter gnats. As soon as you poke your head and shine a light around these lift off grumpily, wary of the spiders lurking with intent, and shift along the wall a few feet.

Winter gnats are members of the family Trichoceridae, and look like miniature daddy-long-legs. They are easy enough to identify because of their distinctively short A2 vein that starts off with great intentions and then just gives up. I am hoping that this won’t be the trajectory of my Year of the fly!

Wing drawing from http://drawwing.org/insect/trichoceridae-wing