Family Bombyliidae

It's the time of year when a walk down the driveway to pick up the mail can mean an hour in the yard snapping photos. It happened again yesterday.

Swarming around the blooming crabapple, wasps, honey bees, bumblebees, carpenter bees, and bee flies zipped and zapped, sucking the nectar from every blossom, ignoring me.

Some 250+ snaps later, I had two that show the hovering insect in some detail: a furry creature with long legs and almost hidden stripes. I learned, slowly, that if I stood still, they would come to me.Thinking they were tiny hummingbird moths, I emailed photos to my entomologist friend Jill, who corrected me and sent me surfing the web.

"Hover and dart," BugGuide.net says, of the bee fly.

The same could have been said of me with my camera.