I thought we might be overdue diptera so here are a pair of mating Yellow Dung Flies, Scathophaga stercoraria, at it hammer and tongs up on the Downs. The male is on top with the fancy golden hairy pantaloons. They are one of the commonest flies in the world, their distribution reflecting that of human animal husbandry.
They are also one of the most studied organisms in the world, lending themselves, like their prey and smaller cousins the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, to scientific experiment as a result of their rapid reproductive turnover.
The female lays her eggs on fresh dung and the larvae grow through three stages over five days. They then spend a further five days emptying their stomachs before burying down beneath the dung to pupate.
The young flies are anautogenous, which means they can't crack on with the sex until they've fed up for it.
No shit!
A thistle is not always just a thistle; it might be a musk thistle! Carduus nutans is a real stonker. There's something extravagantly thistley about it. When you peer closely you can see it's covered in candy-floss. When you peer even more closely you'll see it's drawn its own entomological crowd. In this case a pretty picture-wing fly. Rather sadly this cannot be identified to species level without collection and dismemberment, and I only took photos. However it's either the common Urophilus jaceana or the unusual and rather special U. solstitialis. We shall never know! 
Another harbinger of Spring: the large bee-fly, Bombylius major.
I love these funny creatures with their ridiculous permanently protruding proboscii. They hover about before zooming in to drink nectar from the primroses and cherry blossom.
When they've had sufficient they choose a sunny patch of bare earth or wall to kick back and relax.
Apparently they're a mysterious bunch, the bee-flies. Prolific in species terms but poorly understood scientifically in terms of life-cycle. The majority are parasitic at the larval stage, with some being host-specific while others are more opportunistic.
They belong to the order Diptera, the true flies. Estimated to contain around a quarter of a million species of which only about half have been described. They are distinguished by having a pair of wings on their mesothorax and sucking mouthparts.
This is the first fly on the blog and surely one of the most popular!
