Look what came to my native garden!

Once I had a lot of new native plants in my yard, I was excited to see which pollinators I would attract. The most exciting part was discovering two species of pollinators I didn’t even realize existed: metallic sweat bees (yes, they do like sweat and may actually land on your skin for a taste—don’t be alarmed!) and bee-mimic flies.

The metallic sweat bees I’ve seen are very small (smaller than a honey bee, which is actually not native) and have the most beautiful metallic green and blue coloring. The bee-mimic flies are tiny yellow-and-black flies and can be identified as flies because they have large compound eyes and only two wings, unlike the four wings of bees. In my yard, I find both of them most often on the brown-eyed Susan, slender mountain mint, purple coneflower and goldenrods.