Each year, Maine Audubon and Birth Roots partner to host the Pollinator Parade & Picnic for families with young children. Leading up to this special event, we like to highlight some of our favorite pollinators! If you have tickets to the parade, consider this some extra costume inspiration. And even if you can’t attend, we hope these posts will help to spread the word about pollinators far beyond our one-day celebration.
Pollinator Spotlight: Flower Flies
With our annual Pollinator Parade right around the corner, many of us are getting costumes ready: pulling out our antennae, dusting off our bee suits, or crafting butterfly wings. On Saturday, May 16, young children and their grownups alike will don those costumes and come together at Gilsland Farm to learn, play, and parade in honor of our pollinator friends. And while we still maintain that toddlers and solitary bees have a surprising amount in common, there’s one group of pollinators that truly embodies the spirit of Pollinator Parade: flower flies.
Pollinator Parade may be the only day this year that I dress as a pollinator, but many flower flies spend their whole adulthood in costume! That said, their reason for looking like a bee or wasp is far less whimsical. Flower flies can’t sting, but looking like they could gives them some protection from predators, a phenomenon known as Batesian mimicry (above photo: Eastern Calligrapher, photo by Stacia Brezinski).
Because they’re colorful and harmless, flower flies are a wonderful insect to observe with children. Young naturalists often notice right away the characteristic flight that gives these insects their other name: hover flies. (Those looped into taxonomy also know this group of insects as syrphid flies, from the family Syrphidae). If you’re able to watch one land, look for a few of the giveaways that indicate it’s a fly in disguise and not a bee. Flies have very large eyes, and only two wings, not four like bees and wasps. Bees and wasps also fold their wings when they land, but flies land with their wings out to the side.
Of course, when it comes to representing Pollinator Parade, flower flies don’t just look the part. They are important pollinators and have been documented visiting more than 70% of food crops and animal-pollinated wildflowers worldwide. They’re also in trouble. Declining populations prompted Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife (DIFW) to add three flower fly species to their Species of Special Concern list in 2024, and DIFW also launched the Maine Flower Fly Survey in 2025 to gather more data about what they describe as an “important and undersurveyed pollinator group in Maine.” We can help by participating in this community science initiative, and also by planting native plants, protecting pollinator habitat, and by educating our communities.
You don’t need to dress up like a pollinator to help spread the word about how important they are, but it sure does make it fun! If you’d like to join us at Pollinator Parade on May 16 at Gilsland Farm, tickets are available here on the Birth Roots website.
