Drone fly

A drone fly, Eristalis tenax, feeding on ragwort in August 2013. Brown, hairy-looking and the size of a worker, it is one of the most convincing copies of the European honeybee, and gardeners mistake it for one all the time. The clearest giveaway is one pair of wings instead of a bee's two, along with big fly eyes and short, stubby antennae. The disguise may have fooled people for millennia. The ancient story that bees could be born from the carcass of an ox has been linked, since an 1893 paper by the entomologist Carl Robert Osten-Sacken, to this fly, whose maggots develop in rotting, wet matter and which can lay its eggs in carcasses.