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Photo#16443
Hover fly - Helophilus fasciatus

Hover fly - Helophilus fasciatus
University of Guelph Arboretum, Guelph, Wellington, Ontario, Canada
May 4, 2005
Another Helophilus for the guide. I don't know if these are identifiable to species based on photos, but I'll take a look when that part of the Ontario Syrphidae comes out.

Helophilus fasciatus
Helophilus fasciatus.
Helophilus latifrons has the basal two antennal segments black

Good news & bad news
The Good News is there's only 3 species of Helophilus in southern Ontario. The Bad News is you need a good view of the face to separate them. Jeff Skevington told me last year that:
"obscurus is the only Ontario species with a shiny black media stripe on the face (the other two have a shiny yellow to reddish brown stripe). The key couplet to separate the other two species goes as follows:
- male vertex narrow, wholly black pilose, female front and vertex entirely black pilose.... fasciatus
- male vertex broad, partially yellow pilose, female front broadly yellow pilose.... latifrons"
The Really Bad News is there's 2 additional species in central and northern Ontario, and there's 28 more in North America.

 
Thanks
Thanks for the info Robin. I'm guessing this would be H. latifrons based on those characters - I have another, poorer, shot which shows the face a bit better, and I can see that the medial stripe is reddish brown. I'm not quite sure on the separation between the other two, partly because I don't know which sex this specimen is, but I think I can see yellow pile on the front in the full sized shot, which would seem to indicate H. latifrons by the couplet.

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