It's that fly time of year

Time to be watching for the F-16 of the insect world: the robber flies. It's actually more fun than watching rattlesnakes or going fishing - the chances of seeing them is far greater. For sheer numbers, flies are second to beetles (people who study beetles claim that every fifth living thing on this planet is a beetle).

Sue was hanging out the wash the other day and shouted to me, "Hey, Jim! Come see these robber flies mating!" That was something I had never witnessed before. As I placed the images on my old Canon Rebel, I thought I heard one of them - or perhaps both - shout, "Yahoo!" I thought robber flies would make a good column...

Right here in the Sisters Country we enjoy a wonderful selection of robber flies. I say "wonderful" in spite of the fact that they capture and eat my honey bees. You gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to robber flies. Like all predators, they're just after what is easiest to catch. When a robber fly discovers one of my bee hives he probably thinks he's died and gone to heaven. There is no good or bad in nature. Like Rudyard Kipling pointed out in his "Just So" stories, things just happen because they "have to."

Most of the time, adult robber flies are on the wing snapping up what they can, and they do it with aplomb. Like the F-16 that my two older boys fly, once they zero in on a target, the job is done; once a robber fly targets an insect, that unfortunate creature becomes a meal.

Robber flies "eat" by stabbing their powerful, soda-straw-like mouth-part into their victims, injecting digestive enzymes, and suckin' 'em dry. They then throw away the empty carcass and go in pursuit of more grasshoppers, other flies, beetles, moths, butterflies, damselflies, wasps and my honey bees.

Like all the flies in this great old world we live on, robber flies are also very agile. Flies (Dipterans) are the only order of insects that possess two wings. To compensate for the "missing" other two, they are equipped with two balancers beneath the wings known as "halteres," which function as gyroscopes. The halteres vibrate up and down in time with the wings and therefore provide the fly with the ability to make instant course corrections, one of the reasons robber flies are so good at capturing other flying insects.

At Lava Beds National Monument, I once witnessed a robber fly snatch a botfly out of the air! The photo above is of that robber fly when it came to rest near my old Chevy Suburban.

As any livestock person can tell you, anything that removes botflies is good to have around. There are nearly 150 known species of botflies on Planet Earth, and as far as I know, they are the only family of flies whose larvae live under the skin of mammals, including you and me. Thankfully, there is only one botfly known to use humans as a host - Dermatobis hominis, of South America - and I hope it stays there.

Even though I'm pretty much a "live-and-let-live" person, when I saw a botfly larva under the skin of a mouse I was appalled. That huge beast was almost as large as the mouse, and when I saw the robber fly sucking the life out of that botfly at Lava Beds I said to myself, "Gotcha!"