Brachypalpoides lentus ?

[Roger Morris]

This species does not immediately look like a Syrphus. When I caught it I got a glimpse and assumed Didea - it was only when I examined it under the microscope that it became clear - hairy squamae - and of course I'd seen it previously when Stuart Ball and I spotted it in the Rawendennan collection.

Both Van Veen and Haarto & Kerppola have keys and this species runs to a couplet with Syrphus attenatus. I'm not familiar with the latter but have Goeldlin de Tifenau's paper and descriptions (in French) - I'm not sure one could erect jizz characters from this. My feeling is that the picture in Bartsch's excellent Swedish book does not really illustrate it accurately as the specimens I have seen have a much more matt brownish-black thorax. It is seemingly a boreal species as Goeldlin's type specimens all came from Sweden and the maps on GBIF all point to the northern Baltic (with albeit limited data).

UK Syrphus don't look a bit like it and I would probably opt for Scaeva first off - at least with the females. I'm fairly certain that this is a vagrant at the moment. I suspect the same also stands for Syrphus nitidifrons which was added last year.

A paper will be published in Dipterists Digest in due course but only once we have time to get photographs of salient characters.

Regards

Roger