Dumbledore

Before Dumbledore was the famous surname of the headmaster at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it was a British dialect word for bumble bee. According to bumblebee.org, there are 46 species of bumble bees in North America. This one is a common eastern bumblebee, Bombus impatiens.

This is one of my favorite "dumbledores," a golden northern bumble bee, Bombus fervidus. Click to enlarge.

In the 1866 book Description of the Habitations of Animals, Classed According to Their Principle Construction, the author, John George Wood, says: "Any Humble-bee, no matter what species, is known as a Bumble-bee, a Foggie, a Dumbledore, or a Hummel-bee, according to the peculiar dialect of the locality." This is the brown belted bumble bee Bombus griseocollis.

J.K. Rowling said, during an interview on WBRU Radio in 1999: "Dumbledore is an old English word meaning bumblebee. Because Albus Dumbledore is very fond of music, I always imagined him as sort of humming to himself a lot." This is the two-spotted bumble bee, Bombus bimaculatus.

There are dumbledores in J.R.R. Tolkien's poem "Errantry," first published in 1933. An excerpt from the longer poem that describes the events of a hero's jouriney is below, and two more common eastern bumble bees in a rose, above.

"He battled with the Dumbledors,
the Hummerhorns, and Honeybees,
and won the Golden Honeycomb;
and running home on sunny seas
in ship of leaves and gossamer 
with blossom for a canopy,
he sat and sang, and furbished up
and burnished up his panoply." 

     

And, in honor of the onset of hot buggy August nights -- this guy, not a dumbledore but a humble fly, reenacting a line from yet another old poem that mentions a dumbledore. Below is "An August Midnight" by Thomas Hardy, published 1901.

"A shaded lamp and a waving blind,

And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:

On this scene enter -- winged, horned, and spined

A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;

While 'mid my page there idly stands

A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands... 

Thus meet we five, in this still place,

At this point of time, at this point in space,

-- My guests besmear my new-penned line,

Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.

"God's humblest they! I muse. Yet why?

The know Earth-secrets that know not I."

Flesh Flies

A pair of flesh flies, family Sacrophagidae, copulating on a fence rail. Click to enlarge. 

I saw these flies on a fence in Brooklyn Bridge Park. I was the only one of hundreds of people there who was watching the flies have sex. It impressed me with how much of the lives of urban critters goes unnoticed, as if they occupy a parallel universe.

Here is a poem by Ethel Jacobsen.

The Insect's World

Insects are creatures with three pairs of legs,
Some swim, some fly; they lay millions of eggs.
They don't wear their skeletons in, but out.
They come in three parts. Some are bare; some have hair.
Their hearts are in back; they circulate air.
They smell with their feelers and taste with their feet,
And there's scarcely a thing that some insect won't eat:
Flowers and woodwork and books and rugs,
Overcoats, people, and other bugs.
When five billion trillion keep munching each day,
It's a wonder the world isn't nibbled away!

Flesh Fly

A flesh fly in the family Sarcophagidae. They typically have three longitudinal stripes on the back and a checkerboard pattern on the top of the abdomen. Click to enlarge. 

Flesh fly larvae (maggots) feed on corpses and carrion, and sometimes on the wounds of mammals, hence their common name. They are also found on excrement and decaying organic matter. Adults feed on sugary liquids like nectar, sap, and fruit juice. But sometimes they just sit in the sun casting tiny shadows.

The one I photographed, above, was grooming itself on a yellow sign. It reminded me of this haiku from the Japanese poet, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

Don't strike

the fly! He wrings his hands! 

He wrings his feet!