Insects, pokers and spiders

While going round the garden fertilising stuff this morning I was taken with this insect.  As usual I had no idea what family it is but now wonder if it is not some form of hoverfly!

The blurring of the legs in the second image is - unusually - not due to operator ineptitude, but to the speed with which the beast was running about.

This image comes from somewhat later but is again a nice colourful beast.  In this case squatting on a trombacini leaf.

On 9 January I found this hirsute entity dealing with a raspberry leaf (it has a man's work in front of it to defoliate them this year).

While the concept of "blowfly" is generally pretty unpleasant this very large (note scale) example of the breed is quite intricate in close-up. For a better go at ID see comment form James Lumbars below.

Here we have a Christmas Beetle Anoplognathus rugosus- wandering in the top paddock well after Christmas

When I got to the area in which our red-hot pokers are blooming there were a whole lotta ants evident.

There were also a lot of insects with similar dietary habits to mosquitoes.  I didn't take a photograph of them or the bites they took out of me.    However I did take a photograph of part of the array of red-hot pokers with a few interloping dahlias as counterpoint.

As I may have mentioned previously, this is the first time in 4 years that these flowers have really performed.  They are making up for lost time.

Somewhat later (ie 15 January) I came across a couple of colourful spiders.  The second one was extremely active, scampering around every time I nudged one of its (invisible) web-threads!

Another traditional denizen of the bush here is the Orb Spider.  They have a knack of spinning webs across tracks so when running in the bush one need never go hungry ".. there was an old woman who swallowed a spider ...".  They are very colourful however.