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Helophilus pendulus (Linnaeus, 1758)

Identification

Identification difficulty = 2. according to Ball & Morris, 2024¹

Biology

The larva is of the 'long-tailed' aquatic type and can be found in almost any enriched, wet or semi-liquid medium ranging from waterlogged, rotting vegetation at the edge of ponds and ditches to water-filled tree hollows, water-butts, wet compost heaps, slurry pits and even in cow-dung. Adults appear to be very mobile and can be found just about anywhere, frequently well away from water, and visiting a wide range of flowers from ground vegetation to tree-flowers. They are frequent visitors to garden flowers.

Flight period

The following plots show the number of unique records per week that were not reported to be of eggs, larvae or pupae.

Distribution

One of the commonest and most widespread British hoverflies. Speight (2017)² describes it as anthropogenic and as a 'species which has become ubiquitous in some regions of Europe because of its ability to use a wide range of standing water and sub-aqueous habitats'.

Trends

The following plots show the Frescalo TFactor vs year and a map of the rescaled frequency (all records) for the species. For an explanation see here.