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August 7th my danish fellow and biologist Anders N Michaelsen and I saw a huge hoverfly at the Buddleja in my garden in the southermost part of Sweden (at Maglehem in eastern Scania to be more accurate). None of us are true dipterists (even though both of us occasionally do record some flies), so what came to my mind was the species Volucella inanis with the swedish popular name "bålgetingblomfluga", that means hornet hoverfly. The fly we saw really resembled an european hornet. I catched the fly (with my fingers since it was not very alert) and took some poor photos in a plastic box just for the garden record, and then released the fly. Unfortunately I left home for vacation and didn't have a chance to dig deeper at the moment. The day after the fly came back and Anders (who stayed in the house) managed to do some more appealing photos. Then, after some chatting, we realized at last that this coudn't be inanis. The black second sternite belongs to V. zonaria and nothing else. Even the body length of aprox 20 mm was to large for inanis. Now, back home, I'm able to measure the length quite exact due to some lines 15 mm apart at the bottom of the plastic box (as shown on one of the images here)
So, i think we have a new and large species for Sweden. But since it's new i would like to hear your opinion just to be completely sure!