06/23/2026
Did you know many types of "flies" there are? And how many of them are actually pollinators? Most cats love catching and eating houseflies, but try and save the pollinator ones (in case they get trapped inside) from the cats! 😸
When you hear "fly," you picture the one circling your lunch — but that's a single species standing in for around 18,000 that pollinate your garden, hunt its pests, and recycle what everything else leaves behind.
North America has more than 18,000 fly species. The house fly and the biting mosquitoes are the loud, unpleasant minority that gave the whole group its reputation. The rest mostly go unnoticed — and they're doing some of the most important work in your yard.
After bees, flies are the second most important pollinators on the planet. They pollinate more than a hundred crops and visit flowers in the cold, wind, and drizzle that keep bees at home. Chocolate exists because a fly pollinates it — cacao flowers are pollinated by tiny midges, not bees.
They also keep pests in check and clean up the messes. Hover fly larvae rank just behind ladybugs as aphid eaters, tachinid flies parasitize caterpillars and stink bugs, and countless fly larvae break down carrion, dung, and rotting plants into soil. Here's the quick tell: a true fly has a single pair of wings, while bees and wasps have two — so the "bee" hovering motionless at a flower is very often a fly.
🪰 What's already near you:
- The "bee" that hovers dead still, darts sideways, and has no stinger is almost certainly a hover fly — a pollinator in a bee costume, given away by its one pair of wings
- The fat dark "wasp" loitering by the compost is a black soldier fly — its larvae are among the fastest composters alive, and the adult has no working mouth, so it can't bite or spread anything
- The "giant mosquito" bouncing around the porch light can't bite you at all — it's a crane fly, all legs and no menace, and its young quietly break down leaf litter
The housefly got the swatter. The other thousands got the flowers 🌸