Poecilanthrax lucifer, banded fee fly, photographed at East Greynolds Park, North Miami, Miami-Dade County, in April 2015.
Bring forth Lucifer. Bring forth Satan himself? Nope. Believe it or not, we’re talking about one of the strangest scientific names ever given a living thing: a species of banded bee fly known to the scientific world as Lucifer.
What is particularly strange about the name is that the bug is pretty much harmless except to certain types of moths.
Etymology, the history of words, is something we dabble in occasionally as we delve into the names of plants and animals we find in the wilds of South Florida. We also dabble in entomology, the study of insects. Both interesting stuff, at least to us.
In the case of our banded bee fly friend, Poecilanthrax lucifer the two intertwine, with a bit of theology thrown in for good measure. It’s impossible not to be curious about the name.
In fact, at least for us, etymology, not entomology, might be the most intriguing thing about this particular banded bee fly — we’ll call him Lucifer for short — how does such a small, harmless creature get stuck with a name that resounds with evil?
And let’s not overlook the genus name with a deadly disease attached. Terrifyingly evocative when you put the two parts of the binomial name together.
And weirdly so. Banded bee flies, including Lucifer, are pretty much harmless. They don’t sting and they don’t bite. They pretty much go about their business bouncing from flower to flower sipping nectar and munching on pollen.
Let’s deal with some bug basics, the entomology, first.
It’s a dangerous world out there for insects, a world full of predators just waiting to snack on them, so defense is essential. Some use camouflage; some do it by being quick. Others by having a sharp bite or sting that makes attackers wary.
A third way is to look tough even if you’re not in the hope predators will be fooled into thinking that you are indeed tough. That’s what bee flies do. They look like bees.
Lucifer bee flies are fairly large as flies go, their bodies a little more than a half-inch long. They have short antennae, large compound eyes, a pair of smokey, veiny wings that are held out at an angle from the body when at rest rather than folded onto the back.
The most notable and defining feature of Lucifer is its densely haired abdomen with alternating black and yellow bands that make these flies look like bees.
A western honeybee nectaring on narrowleaf silkgrass.
Lucifer’s native range includes much of the southern United States, including Florida and points as far west as Texas and portions of the Midwest. It’s also been seen as far north as Canada.
Beyond our borders, Lucifer bee flies can be found in Mexico, Guatemala and other Central American countries, and through parts of Caribbean, including Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and other nearby islands.
While the adults are pretty much harmless, their offspring do pose a threat — they prey on the larvae of certain moths, particularly cutworms or army worms in the family Noctuidae.
Bee flies generally have one generation per year, with their lifecycle in sync with the emergence of the Noctuidae larvae. In the south, however, Noctuidae moths have a second generation, and so do Lucifer bee flies.
Lucifer larvae are also parasites of certain wasp parasites. That makes them hyperparasites — parasites of a parasite.
Otherwise, not a lot is known about banded bee fly childhood.
Now the entymology: It begins with a gentleman named Johann Christian Fabricius, an 18th and 19th century Danish economics professor who is better known as one of the foremost entomologist of his day. It was Fabricius who first identified our guy and classified it as a member of the genus, Poecilanthrax, and gave it the name, Lucifer.
In Latin, Lucifer, translates to “Bringer of Light.” It was the name of the planet Venus in Roman folklore. We think of it as another name for Satan, the fallen angel who becomes all encompassing evil, the devil. It was the former meaning, not the latter that Fabricius had in mind. We assume. Don't really know what he had in mind, because nothing about our bee fly buddy explains the name either way.
More on Lucifer: the name appears only once in the Bible and in only one of the Bible’s various translations: the King James Version of Isaiah 14.12:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
The New Oxford Annotated Bible:
How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you laid the nations low!
If you read the chapter from the beginning, it’s clear that Isaiah was referring to a tyrant, a taunt directed against the king of Babylon, most likely Nebuchadnezzar. Not Satan.
How a reference to Nebuchadnezzar evolves into the devil beats us. In any regard, we doubt Fabricius, a Dane, would have been familiar with the English King James Bible.
Why Fabricius used even the Latin meaning of Lucifer as the name for a banded bee fly is beyond us as well.
The reference to anthrax is a little better explained. In the original Greek, Poecil means various or variegated. Anthrax means coal or charcoal, translating into black or dark. So put it all together and you’ve got Variegated Dark Bringer of Light. Really? Really.
We do have a theory, which is probably wrong, but we'll toss it out there for the heck of it. It involves Lucifer larvae's habit of snacking on Noctuidae larvae. That name derives from the Latin, noct, which means night. Lucifer brings light to the dark? It's a bit of a stretch since Fabricius would have had to know that Lucifer larvae indeed dines of these moth larvae.
There's also the matter of when Noctuidae moths were first described and named, which happens to be 1758 by none other than the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. Fabricius published his work on Lucifer in 1775, so that part, at least, works out. Linnaeus also happened to be Fabricius's mentor, so he would Fabricius would have had access to his work.
A little more about Mr. Fabricius: From what we can tell, he never visited the New World, and would have relied on specimens shipped to him by collectors for his research. He came up with a method of classifying insects by their mouth parts. It became the standard of the day, replacing Linnaeus’s own system, which used wings. Eventually, it became evident that Fabricius’s system was inadequte as well as scientists described more and more insects. He’s still considered one of the founders of systematic entomology.
In any regard, Lucifer the banded bee fly is a member of Bombycilidae, the family of bee flies.
East Greynolds Park