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Flies tied to mimic bees are
immediately recognizable date as far back as historical dressings
like the Brown Hackle.
Dressings of wasps and bees, like many terrestrial flies, tend more toward
generalization than flies tied to represent water-born insects. However
flawed the assumption might be, fly tiers seem to think trout will respond better
to a strict representation of insects they see underwater all the time, but
only need a suggestive pattern to represent
terrestrials. Whereas dressings of the Small Ant or Black Ant focus
on a pronounced thorax and abdomen, and beetle dressings like the Bracken Clock assign
iridescent peacock herl to suggest wing cases and abdomens, wasp and bee
dressings typically focus on two key traits, the insect's abdominal barring
and its wing coloration. This focus has not changed much since the late
middle ages. Dame Julianna Berner’s A treatyse of fysshynge wyth an
Angle (1496), for instance, provides an early instance of such
considerations: “The body of blacke wull & lappid abowte wt yellow
thread: the winges of the bosarde.”
In Part II of The Compleat
Angler (1676), Charles Cotton includes a very similar Wasp-flie as
the third dressing for July: “We have likewise this month a Wasp-flie, made
either of a black Cats tail, ribb’d about with yellow silk, and the wing of
the grey feather of a Mallard.” Likewise, John Turton includes a hackled
dressing of the Wasp Fly in his Angler’s Manual (1836), which he also dresses
for July: “made with light brown silk: wing, starling’s underwing feather;
body, brown bear’s hair, ribbed with yellow silk.”
William Blacker includes a
slightly different dressing for a Bee —the standard dressing, he claims, for
all bee or wasp patterns—in The
Art of Angling (1843):
“Body, Yellow tail, then brown, then black.
Legs, Black-red hackled, at the head.
Wings, Hen pheasant, or partridge wings.”
Despite including dressings for a
variety of terrestrial categories in his List
of Natural Flies (1843),
Michael Theakston emphasizes other terrestrials - house flies, beetles, and
ants. Alfred Ronalds, likewise, does not include a yellow and black barred
bee in his Fly Fisher’s Entomology (1836), though both Theakston and
Ronalds include an Orange Fly, dressed
to imitate a small orange wasp.
In Favorite Flies and their
Dressings (1892), Mary
Orvis Marbury lists the Bee as no. 98. Its dressing includes the wings and
familiar chenille body associated with the less imitative dressings of bee
flies as attractor patterns. She notes that “imitations have been made of
bees since early times with no special restriction as to material, so each
maker has chosen his own.” Regarding the Bee dressing she includes, Marbury
explains that it “was first made by C. F. Orvis in 1878, for use in streams
west of the Mississippi River. The peculiar burnished effect of the upper
feather of the wild turkey used for the wings, and the alternate rings of
chenille which permitted a bulky, bee-like body without too much weight.”
Granting the imperfections that always attend reproductions of color plates
in historical texts, the Bee Marbury depicts on Plate M - Trout Flies has a
chenille body of alternating olive and gold rather than brown or black and
yellow. Paired with the brown "wild turkey" wings and the brown
furnace hackle, the lightweight, "bulky" chenille body was probably
less representative of a bee than a grasshopper in the large "streams
west of the Mississippi."
In Wet Flies (1995 and 2015), Dave Hughes provides a dressing of a classic
winged wet fly, the McGinty, which seems related to Marbury’s dressing of the
Bee:
“Hook: 2x stout, size 10-14.
Thread: Black 6/0 or 8/0 nylon.
Hackle: Brown hen.
Tail: Scarlet red hackle fibers under teal flank fibers.
Body: Yellow and black chenille, wound together.
Wings: White-tipped mallard secondary wing quills.”
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