Been cold here.  Dang cold.  Spitting snow all weekend, cold.  Too darn cold to fly, cold.  Least-wise it was a few hours ago.  That’s what this little gal (above), told me during a brief conversation in the garden this morning.  Pretty isn’t she?  And pretty harmless too . . . unless.

Unless you are a solitary, ground-nesting bee or wasp, or maybe sometimes, a beetle.

Adult Bee Flies feed on floral nectar in the early spring, and as such are important pollinators.  But their larvae are voracious predators of, get this: bee larvae.  To read more about these fascinating creatures, click here:  Bee Flies of the genus Bombylius.  (Pictures and words are woven in such a way here that it should really help round out the insect part of the story.)

If you read all the way to the bottom of the article, you’ll notice that the author, Louise Kulzer references three different experts on Bee Flies, including one Frank M. Hull and his book, Bee Flies of the World, published by Smithsonian Institution Press.

I was maybe ten years old when I first became acquainted with the acclaimed, Dr. Hull.  He and my dad were both teaching summer courses in the biology department at the University of Mississippi in Oxford at the time.  I had come down from Memphis to hang out with Dad for a week, and spent most of my days wandering around campus and out into the outlying woods, observing birds and catching things (think bugs, salamanders, frogs and snakes).  It didn’t take much to keep me entertained in those days.  I had my binoculars, my bird book and my pocket knife.  With those simple tools and enough change in my pocket to buy a cold Coke and some redskin peanuts mid-afternoon, I could always find plenty to keep me busy for those tedious hours that Dad was tied up lecturing.  ( I did usually try to attend his labs.  Dissecting things and collecting things were way more interesting than listening to a white-coated prof talking ‘Biologese’ to a bunch of wonkish students for an hour ).

I had been hearing stories about the very elusive and cantankerous, Dr. Hull for some time.  In addition to being the world’s foremost expert on Bee Flies, he was also reputed to be, ummm, rather eccentric.  I remember one account from either one of the summer school students, (or was it one of the other professors?) that described Dr. Hull as a man who would occasionally go off hunting for bumblebees with a twelve-gauge shotgun.  As the story went, Dr. Hull liked to vaporize a big ol’ ‘Bumble-bee’ from time to time, just for the sport of it.  Hmmmmmmmmm.  I’ll bet you it never happened, but really, it would have only made him that much  more fascinating if it actually had.

Remember though, I’m ten, maybe eleven years old at the time, and there I am in this vaunted academic realm hearing stories about this crazy old coot who is the world’s greatest expert on some obscure bug, which I then overlay with the stories I hear from my dad who claims that Dr. Hull won’t even give him the time of day.  Rumor was he would hardly acknowledge or speak to any of his professorial colleagues.  He’d simply blink, turn and walk off, mid-sentence while they sputtered and fumed and tried to find some new way to strike up a meaningful conversation with him.

I liked this Dr. Hull guy immensely already, and I hadn’t even met him.  I guess I had seen a glimpse of him one time, but he was walking away from me.  He turned the corner in a flourescent-lit, Biology department halllway.  That was the extent of it.

Then, one day, during a morning of birding and bug-catching down by a creek just off campus, I had captured an amazing looking humming-bird moth in a jar, and wanted desperately to learn more about it.  I looked it up in an insect book in my dad’s office and recognized it as a Sphinx Moth, but I really wanted to understand more than the miniscule description the Peterson’s Field Guide (or equivalent), would offer.  So, I set off down the hall to find Dr. Hull’s office. 

I knocked timidly, unable to shake that sense of confound and intimidation in all the grown-ups’ stories I’d heard about the man, but once I’d rapped my knuckles on the door a few times, I felt compelled to see if he would answer.  I sipped that stale Hall’s of Academia air in small, unobtrusive breaths and waited.  I knocked again, a little louder.

Then I heard footfalls and saw the knob turn.  The door opened cautiously.  There before me was the famous Dr. Hull, scanning me up and down and stopping for a brief moment at the jar in my hand.  The door opened further then, and along with it, a smile and an invitation to come in.

I introduced myself properly, as I’d been taught, and immediately proceeded to extend both my jar and my story of that morning’s hunt.  When I explained that I had looked my Hummingbird Moth up in a book, but felt unsatisfied by the minimal information I was offered there, I added that I was hoping he’d be able to help me understand why the moth looked like a hummingbird, and whether there were other bugs that looked like things they were not.   I suspect I had him at hello.

He led me through a doorway and into a cluttered lab filled with metal cabinets and trays and every sort of insect gathering apparatus you could ever imagine.  And within seconds he had pulled open a drawer filled with rows and rows of Sphinx moths of many variations, and a most fascinating conversation had begun.

It was better than an hour and a half later when I ran into my Dad in the hallway.  He looked worried and said he’d been looking everywhere for me.  “ Where the heck were you?’ he asked.

“Oh, I’ve been talking with Dr. Hull.” I said nonchalantly, extending my jar to show him the moth I’d caught.

I wish I had a picture of his face in that moment.  It wasn’t exactly a look of horror, but it did have certain elements of shock in it.  He sputtered for a moment and then his face began to transform into a wide, incredulous smile.

“He talked with you?” he queried earnestly.  “You mean to tell me that you’ve just spent the afternoon talking with Dr. Hull?  . . . About a moth you caught?”

“Yeah!”  I said.  “He’s really cool, Dad, and he’s got drawers and drawers full of moths and bees and bee flies, and Bumble bees and wasps. . .  And he showed them all to me, and showed me articles that he’d written on them and showed me drawings and photos, and told me why he thinks they are so cool  and he told me how some people think he’s kinda crazy cuz he’s spent so many years studying them, and . . .”

“But I don’t think he’s crazy at all.”  I countered while my dad reeled at my story and tried to sort it all out.

“He’s never talked with me for even a minute.” Dad mumbled to no one in particular, lost somewhere in thought.

“Maybe you should catch a bug.” I offered.  “Then you could go ask him about it.”  I smiled further.

The look I got then told me I should hold my tongue and that I’d either said too much already or simply offered up what Dad considered to be utter nonsense, but I felt certain that, really this was all it would have taken. 

I didn’t understand yet that when you’re a grown up with a terminal degree you can’t quite do that, or that at least in some minds, you’re not supposed to.  What I did begin to understand that day was this:  something about my afternoon with a reclusive genius struck my dad and each of his colleagues that he related the story to afterward as a mystery just slightly beyond their ken.  Why would that old kook spend hours talking to a ten year old about a moth in a jar, even opening up and showing him his rare insect collection, (Dad had never seen it), while refusing to even let them finish a couple of sentences in the hallway?

I didn’t really understand their end of this situation at all, and I’ve worked diligently not to come to an approach, or stage in life where I can relate.  (It is my goal to die an old man who can still claim unoquivocally that Gee Whiz is one of his very best and dearest friends.)

Luckily, I got to meet the child in that lauded old scientist that day by introducing him to the curious child within me . . . We met through an innocently asked question.  Then, we two kids of such different ages shared our excitement and our curiosity over how cool bugs are for the next hour or two in a fascinating, give-and-take conversation.  What really is so mysterious about that?

This morning as I walked my garden, taking in all that is so newly alive and wonderful, relishing all that is growing and becoming, I came upon a Bee Fly that was just too chilled to be able to take wing, and I crouched down to study it for a while.  She was positioned in an upright, almost “Rocket-on-the-Launching-Pad” position on a damp, mint leaf, waiting for enough accumulated warmth to be able to take off and set about her daily Bee Fly chores.  I reached out to touch her very carefully with a finger, and then approached again, this time with my little camera to see her through much closer focusing eyes.

And as I did this, forty years of curiosity and frenetic doing, four decades of pain and joy and wonder and child-rearing and learning and labor and questioning all somehow vanished momentarily, and I was transported suddenly back in time to a conversation with an amazing old ‘coot’ entomologist, on a lazy summer afternoon in the air-conditioned back-room of his office at Ole’ Miss.

As I took her picture, I explained to the Bee Fly that I had once met a friend of hers.  And then I knelt there with her for a while as she warmed herself in the sunlight, until she could take off.  We went our separate ways, each with our own sets of chores to be achieved, each with our own perceptions of what strange thing had just taken place.

And as I turned toward the house and this day’s list of things needing doing, I found myself smiling at the profound sense of gratitude and well-being I felt.  At the sweet memory of an adult who had once made time for this questioning kid.  At that delightful way a tiny, chilled insect could trigger such a wonderful journey backward through time.

“Good Day to you, Dr. Hull.” I whispered.  “Good day to you, sir . . . wherever you are.”