Edit: this post has been moved to my new ant blog, Wild About Ants.
Category: Find Out More (Page 19 of 20)
The bug of the week last week was..drum roll…
A flower fly!
I bet some of you were thinking that it was a honey bee. The flower fly has two wings rather than four. Although you might mot be able to see that the honeybee has four, the fly holds it’s wings out away from it’s body more. The flies have bigger eyes. The antennae of the flower fly come from the middle of the face and are shorter than that of the honey bee. Once you know to look there are a lot of differences.
Flower flies fool people all the time.
See if you can spot the differences:
Honey Bee versus Flower Fly
Some of you may have been wondering how watching birds (from weekend science fun this week) could be science. As I mentioned earlier, observing is an important science skill. Many famous scientists and inventors started out by observing nature, for example Leonardo da Vinci.
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about how people become scientists. There seems to be a pattern that the interest is developed at home, usually from interacting with a parent or close relative. But a curiosity about the natural world also seems to be a factor.
If you have some time, listen to the podcasts at Ask-A-Biologist, or read the transcripts. The host of the series asks many of his guests about their path to becoming scientists. The answers are quite illuminating.
For more information, see Roberta Gibson Writes.