I found these two Bee Hawk Moths mating in my backyard. What species are they?
I was just smelling our lilac bush in our backyard when I heard this buzzing noise, I looked down to find two bee hawk moths mating. I had no idea what they were at first, they just looked like a pair of BEE'S! I looked closer and saw their wings and moth-like antennae's, and knew right away they were probably a type of imitation moth. Ran inside, grabbed my camera and took pictures.
I live in northern Ontario, Canada. Thunder Bay is my city, to be exact. It is june 11 2011 and just saw these two attemptin' to make lil babies.
I read up that the broad-bordered Bee Hawk moth and the Narrow-bordered Bee hawk moths are native to England/Australia. But this Bee hawk moth was neither of the two. I can't seem to find its specific species on the internet anywhere, can someone help me out? This is quite interesting, and are they even supposed to be found in Northern Ontario, Canada?
Here are the pics!
Underbelly shot - 
Shot from above - 
Close up of another shot from above - 
And here is a regular sized picture straight off my Nikon d5000, not cropped -
Its the red on the very bottom tips of their wings that I haven't seen in any other bee hawk moth. Very beautiful moths!
It's a narrow-bordered bee hawk moth. You can tell because it doesn't have broad dark brown band on the transparent forewing edge, as the site below says.
Also, no, they are not suppose to be in Canada. You should probably call some nature places, to show them! Or even catch the egg or something. Because it may be a nuisances to the native species, or even be a great thing for other people.
It has a wide range, from Ireland across temperate Europe to the Ural Mountains, western Siberia, Novosibirsk and the Altai. It is also known from the Tian Shan eastwards across Mongolia to north-eastern China and southwards to Tibet. There's a separate population found from Turkey to northern Iran.
Well, probably the definitive thing to do is submit you absolutely TERRIFIC photos to BugGuide and see what they say. I don't find an exact match right off but it's one of four. My guess would be Snowberry
http://bugguide.net/node/view/2637/tree