Syrphid Fly

Description:

When I was taking the above pictures, this morning, my first thought was that this was a wasp. However, as soon as I looked at the camera's screen and zoomed in a little to see the eyes, I realised that it is a fly. So, having some familiarity with Syrphids (many of which are wasp mimics), I was fairly confident that I could call it an Unidentified Syrphidae if I could not identify the species. After a considerable time spent scrambling about online looking at all the Syrphids I could find, I decided to download a scientific paper - https://bonn.leibniz-lib.de/dateien/doku... - the heading looked promising "Flower flies (Diptera: Syrphidae) of Philippines, Solomon Islands, Wallacea and New Guinea". The paper turned out to be very interesting, but (as with most scientific documents) it contains numerous drawings of anatomical minutia which are, no doubt, essential to its purpose, but the few actual photos of complete specimens didn't really help me much. Nonetheless, I did pick up one or two possible ideas which sent me back to searching the internet again. One of these possibilities led me to a Wikipedia article which shocked me to the core and I immediately reverted to my original thought "Unidentified Syrphidae". Please look at Notes below.

Habitat:

This Syrphid Fly was spotted on unidentified foliage in the rice mill backyard. This part of the backyard is in the shade of the building and some trees and tends to be rather damp.

Notes:

As a result of reading the scientific document mentioned above, I thought there might be a chance of finding the species I was looking for in the Subgenus Chymophila. So, I looked it up in Wiki -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chymophila - the first few words just horrified me. To avoid any ambiguity, I will quote it verbatim: "Chymophila is a subgenus of the hoverfly genus Microdon. It was previously considered to be exclusively Neotropical, but is now also known from the Nearctic and Oriental realms, and one species is known from Japan. Chymophila was based on a composite type species: the holotype is a body of C. fulgens with the head of a conopid glued on." Well, I don't know what my chances are of spotting a Chymophila fulgens with the head of a Conopidae glued on, flying around in my backyard, but if I do, I will post a spotting immediately :-)