Pied hoverfly
The pied hoverfly is a big black fly with three pairs of white comma marks on its back end. It can hang still in the air like a tiny helicopter. Its babies are hungry little helpers that eat the bugs that harm garden plants.
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Fun facts
Its eyes are covered in tiny hairs.
The male's eyes touch in the middle of its head, but the female's eyes have a gap between them.
Its larva looks like a little slug, light green or sometimes pink, with a white stripe down its back.
In Britain it is a traveller. Some years lots of them fly in, and other years almost none come.
It likes flat flower heads like cow parsley, and also honeysuckle and daisies.
Most asked questions about Pied hoverfly
?Can a pied hoverfly sting?
No. Hoverflies are flies and have no sting at all.
?What do pied hoverflies eat?
The grown-ups drink nectar from flowers. The larvae eat aphids, which helps gardeners.
?How big is a pied hoverfly?
It is about 11 to 15 millimetres long, a big fly for a hoverfly.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Scaeva pyrastri
- Group
- Flies and mosquitoes
- Family
- Syrphidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Diptera > Syrphidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, North America
Where the facts come from
- Scaeva pyrastri (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Alvesgaspar. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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