Next

Scaeva albomaculata (Macquart, 1842)

Identification

Identification difficulty = 5. microscope_icon camera_icon_question according to Ball & Morris, 20241

Biology

Little known. In Greece, it visits flowers such as Broom Cytisus sp. in dry grassland. There is also an account of larval feeding on aphids in Almond orchards in Iran (Nourbakhsh et al., 2008)2. Larvae pupate in soil at a depth of between 3 and 5 cm. Parasitism is also recorded at levels of between 34 & 40% of larvae by Ichneumonidae and Encyrtidae.

Flight period

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

Status

A very scarce vagrant to the British Isles..

Distribution

A Mediterranean species, one specimen of which was taken in Sussex in August 1938. A second, taken in 1949 on the Isle of Wight, has recently been discovered in a museum collection (Palmer 1996)3. dotmap

  1. Ball, S., & Morris, R. (2024). Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland. WILDGuides (3rd ed.). Oxford: Princeton University Press. ↩

  2. Nourbakhsh, S., Soleymannejadian, E., & Nemti, A. (2008). Biology and population dynamics of Scaeva albomaculata (Diptera: Syrphidae) in almond orchards of Shahrekord, Iran. Journal of Entomological Society of Iran, 27(2), 93–108. ↩

  3. Palmer, C. (1996). A further record of Scaeva albomaculata in Britain and a note on the K.G. Blair collection of British Diptera. Dipterists Digest (Second Series), 2, 97–99. ↩