Bug Squad

Hover flies do know how to hover. Like a helicopter with spinning blades, the hover fly lingers seemingly motionless in mid-air over a flower before zeroing down to feed on the nectar. Sometimes theyre called flower flies. Sometimes syprhids.

There they sat, a row of jack o'lanterns ready for a light. Undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, created them for the "Happy Halloween" open house, held Oct. 23 at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, 1124 Academic Surge, UC Davis.

If you're interested in insects--the good, the bad and the ugly--don't miss the Northern California Entomology Society meeting on Thursday, Nov. 6 in Contra Costa County. You don't have to be a member.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. That inductive reasoning (known as "the duck test") doesn't hold true for yellow bugs with black spots. A yellow ladybug (ladybird beetle) and a cucumber beetle look a little alike--at first glance.

The red-pigmented white pitcher plant we purchased at the UC Davis Arboretum Plant Faire looks like a flamboyant coral reef. Like a hat askew, its ruffled lid hangs over the trumpet-shaped pitcher. The pitcher is actually a long, hollow tubular leaf. But looks are deceiving.