CLOSED: Mystery Bug - Fly or Beetle?

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badmommablogger Columbus, OH Jun 13, 2010

Found this guy hanging out in my garden near my pea plants. Friend or Foe or Neutral? Any ideas of what this is?

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kennedyh Churchill, Victoria, Australia(Zone 10a) Jun 13, 2010

badmommablogger,

I just answered this query in the BugFiles How-to's forum, but I repeat my answer here as it will get a wider audience.

Your bug is neither a beetle nor a fly. Beetles have hard front wings. Flies have only one pair of wings and you can tell from your picture that yours has 2 pairs (4 wings). I thought at first it might be a wasp of some kind, but the antennae and the apparently scaly front wings suggested that it might (somewhat surprisingly) be a moth.

I then managed to track it down and it is indeed a moth, in the clearwing family Sesiidae. Yours is the Squash Vine Borer - Melittia cucurbitae: http://bugguide.net/node/view/291511/bgimage

We have a page for that moth in BugFiles: http://davesgarden.com/guides/bf/go/1404/ and would be pleased if you would add your image to that page.

Kennedy

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