Flies Acting Retardedly

[LaurenChurchill]

Do flies eat nectar?
I didn't think so.
The flies outside my house are extremely weird then because they are acting like bees and spendingWAY too much time inside flowers for a normal fly.
They fly into one, act like a bee for a while (what with the moving and the sucking m-hay), then move on to the next one and keep going like that. It only seems to happen with the Alyssum.
Something's going down man!

Yeah, OK. So I need to drink less coffee. Still, it's weird don't you think? Doncha? Doncha doncha?

 

[PeniG]

Two points:
Flies eat anything and they love sugar (just like any other animal), in which substance nectar is high. Honeymaking is a refinement process that starts with the sugars in nectar.

Some bees look like flies to the casual glance. There are many, many species of bee, all of which utilize pollen and nectar but not all of which store it as honey.

If you are really interested in bees, get down to the library, where you will find many fascinating books - not only on apiculture, but on the different species, bee behavior, bees in myth and symbol, etc.

I also find that it's worthwhile to invest in field guides for the flora and fauna of your local area so that you can ID peculiar creatures and distinguish between the genuinely odd and the strange and wonderful critter you simply weren't familiar with.

Curious facts about honeybees: When honeybees were imported to America from Europe and went native, tribal populations referred to them as "white men's flies." Escaped and naturalized bees generally preceded white settlers across the continent. Honeybees are not native to the temperate zones of the Western Hemisphere, though there are tropical species which store honey underground. European honeybees, which utilize hollow trees, may have played a major role in the extinction of the Carolina parrakeet, which utilized the same habitat.

 

[Anome]

Further to Peni's point above, Australian natve bees look very like flies.

In fact, this time of year, there are very few flies around as the night-time temperatures tend to drop down too far.

Also, flies are pollinators for some plants. The best known is the carrion plant, but these flowers wouldn't be them, as they're a metre across and smell of rotting meat.

 

[sunsplash1]

Are you sure they are flies? Sounds like native bees..

EDIT / Ahh Anome beat me to it.

 

[OneWingedBird]

Also, flies are pollinators for some plants. The best known is the carrion plant, but these flowers wouldn't be them, as they're a metre across and smell of rotting meat.

Dracunculi use the same method and you can grow those in your garden, they give a brief display of one (or several) humungous reddy-black phallic stamen that smell utterly revolting.

 

[LaurenChurchill]

Yup. Damn sure they're flies. They look exactly like a housefly and I've been living in this same place for 18 years. I've never seen a bee that looked remotely like a fly here. All the bees in this area (as far as I know) look like regular ol' stripey bees.
I've also never seen flies to be still around so late. Thanks Anome, that hadn't occured to be until now. It's weird that they're behaving like this. The flowers they're landing on aren't rotten-meaty kind of flowers either. They smell nice.