As we've been talking about bees on this week of the Epic Gardening podcast with Hillary

Kerney, who's the founder of Girl Next Door Honey, there are other pollinators, of course

we all know, you know, birds, etc. that do run through the garden and play an important

role. Hillary, I think you've got a couple that maybe we don't think of in the best light

and perhaps we could shift that thinking.

Yeah, so one of the main pollinators is actually flies and I think we think of them as just

being kind of like annoying and gross, but we actually rely on flies for a lot of pollination

and even some of our food.

So chocolate is pollinated by flies, the cacao plants, there's like a tiny little midge

that pollinates those, so without flies we would not have chocolate.

And then a lot of like seed production actually is reliant on flies, like lettuce and carrots

and some of those things, they actually, they use flies to pollinate those plants so they

can get the seed production.

That is wild.

Isn't it true that figs are pollinated by like the fig wasps or something like that?

Yeah, wasps are another big pollinator that we don't give credit to.

We think wasps is just like, you know, stinging us and you know, like an evil bee, but they're

also important pollinators and I get calls to remove wasps a lot actually and I always

talk people into like leaving them alone.

Usually it's paper wasps, so those are the ones that they make it kind of like umbrella,

shaped kind of thing, usually under the eaves of your house.

Oh yeah, we had those a lot grown up, I remember that.

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