Tiny insects are swarming over the bright yellow flowers of the ‘hen and chicks’ plant on my driveway. It grew from a cutting of a plant growing feral on the side of the road, so I don’t know its name. Some kind of sempervivum, aptly named for ‘eternal life’, probably Aeonium cuneatum. Even with a shelf full of gardening books and the internet it takes me half an hour to identify the species.
The insects are even more difficult. I wonder if they are native bees. There are 1500 species of native bees in Australia and I have no key for identifying them.
My insects look like bees but they hover more like wasps. Wasps often hunt other insects around flowers. But some wasps feed on nectar too, like these ones do. Perhaps I should add the 12,000 species of wasps in Australia to my list of possibilities.
I take some photos and spend a day attempting to identify them. An online key to identifying Australian invertebrates only takes me to ‘hymenoptera’ (bees, wasps and ants). At least I can rule out the ants. The hymenoptera are one of the hardest groups of insects in which to identify species. The wasps, generally, tend to have a longer, narrower ‘waist’ while the bees tend to be more rounded. I try to narrow my quest to things that look like both bee-like and wasp-like, but there are bees that mimic wasps and wasps that mimic bees.
My insects have large bulbous eyes and short stubby antennae. Maybe they are flies? Bee flies and hover flies also look like bees and wasps, although they only have a single pair of fully formed wings, instead of two pairs. There are 30,000 species of flies in Australia, a few hundred of which belong to the bee fly family (Bombyliidae) or hoverflies (Syrphidae). By the end of the day I am completely confused.
‘Hoverflies,’ a gardening friend declares dismissively. ‘They are everywhere this year.’
‘When I was a child my father sometimes took certain “bees” from the flowers, enclosing them in his hand,’ Edith recalled. ‘He tempted me to emulate him by pointing out the ones I might safely handle, but always my courage failed at the critical moment.’
Recollections from childhood shift and blur with time. Edith had thought these were drones – the male honeybees – but it is only in adulthood that she questions this. Honeybee drones rarely visit flowers at all.
‘When golden Aeoniums were in flower, I partly solved the problem. For three weeks the huge inflorescences were haunted by bees which must have found them easy foraging. Now and again a larger brighter “bee” alighted which suggested – the wish no doubt being father to the thought – my father’s “drones”,’ Edith observed. ‘But these were too swift for me to capture, even in a lidded box. They were golden and gleaming, without the hairy, velvety look of the hive bee. Like Michelet I thought them too radiant in their illuminated wings for toilers of the hive. When at last I did capture several I found that they were without the married wings of hymenoptera, quite obviously flies.’
Even Edith must ask for help with identification. The entomologist Tarlton Rayment confirmed that they were flower-loving drone flies, a kind of hoverfly known as Eristalis tenax, found across the world. But I am not the dedicated naturalist that Edith was. I fail to follow my hoverflies to where they are laying their eggs, and miss the opportunity to see their rat-tailed maggots swimming in a barrel of liquid manure.
‘I still cannot associate these swift radiant creatures with the “bees” my father captured so unhurriedly,’ Edith muses, ‘but memory is sometimes treacherous.’
My hoverflies are not the cosmopolitan Eristalis tenax. They are much smaller and thinner with different markings. I have them identified at the museum: Simosyrphus grandicornis, one of the two most common species in Australia, unique to the region.
I remember what it was like to do research before the advent of computers: the time-consuming searches through library catalogues; the books that were only available from overseas; the articles that had to be found by backtracking through the reference lists; scanning along the uniformly bound journal bindings for the year and hoping the page number was correctly recorded. The piles of reprint requests routinely dropped into letterboxes to an unknown reception. The overseas envelopes with their colourful stamps returning some weeks later with shiny reprints, scrawled with compliments.
Today, we access articles instantly, downloaded to our screens. At worst, an obscure reference takes a few days to arrive, ordered through the library. I don’t know if Edith had access to a university library, although I know she used the ‘Public Library’ – the State Library of Victoria. She certainly had a vast collection of reprints. John recalls her exercise books, bulging with indexed reprints. Only one survives. It is a collection of her own reprints, cut from newspapers, glued and folded, the dates and names labelled in ink across the top. The cuttings are soft from age, dropping like concertinas into the narrow, elongated columns of early newspapers. In the back pages are her scientific reprints, on A5-sized sheets of glossy paper sometimes bound in coloured card. Their abundant white space and crisply printed plates contrasts starkly with the browned fragility of the newspapers. This form of print was intended to last.
Edith’s notebook of her own reprints
Not for the first time, I am astonished at what she achieved on her own. More than some professional academics in their entire careers. Not for the first time, I wonder what she could have achieved if she’d gone to university, studied biology, completed a doctorate, been employed to teach and research. More than I have, I imagine.
Edith
