This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. The days are getting longer. Temperatures are getting warmer,

and that means spring is officially in bloom. To celebrate the season, we'll be talking all about

our favorite pollinators. Of course, you're probably thinking bees, right? Well, we will be talking

about beekeeping a bit later in the hour. But right now, did you realize there are all sorts of insects and animals that make up the pollination nation?

And we want to highlight some of these lesser talked about pollinators, like moths, beetles, and all sorts of flies, from hoverflies to gnats. My next guest is here to

guide us through this world of pollinators. Dr. Rabbit Raguso is a pollinator, biologist,

and professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Welcome to

Science Friday. Hello, Ira. Really glad to be here. When we talk about

pollination, there are pollinators that live in hives and those that are solitary. How does that

affect their pollination lifestyles? Like, how do they pollinate plants differently? Wow, what an

open question in that is. The world of pollination is really diverse. If you think of

flowers as investors, they have diversified portfolios. Some of their visitors are low risk,

you know, bonds that are just going to pay out, you know, pay off for them. Like, even self-pollination

is a way to get your seeds on the ground when nothing else comes. But then some other pollinators like the hawk moths that I study are high risk,

high gain stocks in the sense that if and when they come and you can never quite bank on them,

they might be the best thing to happen in a decade for that plant in terms of moving pollen

from a distance and really affecting some important outcrossing and mixing the gene pool for that plant.

And that's especially important if the plant's living in a fragmented landscape where it doesn't

have that many neighbors and maybe some of the pollinators that are more stay-at-homes,

like social bees, might not move the pollen very far when they visit the plant.

So when we study pollination as a spectrum of

animals that have different reasons for visiting flowers, some of the consequences of those

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