While I typically get on the trail for at least a short trek every day, I almost always start my mornings by checking out the now abundant flowers of our patch of Lace-cap Hydrangeas. They're definitely insect magnets, and I'm rewarded for my observational efforts with an abundance of bees, beetles, and other insects, some of which aren't all they immediately seem. So it is with this Yellow Jacket, which, when I first spotted it, made my blood run cold and made me get ready to be stung. Of course, on closer view, I realized that any fears were misguided. It's not a vespid at all but, instead, is a high-quality copy known as a Black-spotted Falsehorn flower fly. Temnostoma excentrica is a fairly common and harmless wasp mimic that gains protection from its uncanny resemblance to a nasty critter; the mimicry is so good that most potential predators... and genuine naturalists... keep their distance.