The UK’s number one hero-fly: super-pollinator and pesticide replacement eater of aphids…

A fantastic neighbor, to us and to our food plants! Marmalade hoverflies, by their sheer number and just how many species of plant they visit, pollinate more individual plants than any other wild insect species. Their larvae also prey on aphids who eat human food crops, being especially effective at protecting wheat and brassicas.

For brassicas, there’s a neat circuit of neighborly relations with adults feeding on flowers, laying eggs on the same plants, and their larvae eating the aphids.

We’ve long known that marmalade hoverflies migrate to the UK, but in the last 15 years, the sheer scale of insect migration has become clearer: around 3.5 trillion per year. The number of marmalade hoverflies among them is equally astounding: as many as 4 billion, traveling thousands of miles at altitudes of up to 1000 meters, to pollinate our plants and eat the aphids… it’s marmalade hoverflies to the rescue!