Webinar: Flies and Wasps (Great Southeast Pollinator Course, Week Six)
Webinar Date: July 21, 2026
Speakers: Dr. Jason Schmidt (University of Georgia, Tifton campus); Dr. Scott Clem (Illinois State University); Gabrielle LaTora (UGA Extension, Fulton County)
Moderator: Becky Griffin (UGA Extension, course host)
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-21_FliesAndWasps.srt (282 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2) for structural reference
Purpose: Fourteen prompts, each pointing at a specific stretch of video with one task. Taken in order they also give a course developer a ready split of the 1:20:45 recording into Moodle sections. The set breaks at the two presenter handoffs: prompts 1–4 cover Schmidt’s biodiversity opening (0:00–18:33), prompts 5–9 cover Clem on flies (18:33–52:46), prompts 10–13 cover LaTora on wasps (52:46–1:14:57), and prompt 14 covers the closing Q&A (1:14:57–1:20:45).
Audience note: Written for home gardeners, Master Gardener volunteers, and Great Southeast Pollinator Census counters. Prompts 5, 13, and 14 are the ones that pay off directly on census day.
Part One: Dr. Jason Schmidt: What Biodiversity Actually Looks Like
Review Task 1
Watch: 0:00 – 5:32
Task: Note how Schmidt’s lab studies who is eating what, and where that research happens.
Key Points to Identify:
- The workflow: take biomaterial from the field (soil, for example), run DNA extraction and PCR, and resolve which species are present, which pollen is on which pollinator, and which species are eating which.
- The partners: solar producers hosting pollinator habitat and grazing, blueberry growers with flower corridors added between plants, and Mercier Orchards in North Georgia, where Madison Love leads a plant materials project.
- The framing: American landscapes are not static, and a range of species are showing declines, the reason habitat enhancement and augmentation are active work rather than something to leave alone.
Review Task 2
Watch: 5:32 – 9:30
Task: Write down the numbers Schmidt used and what the two graphs showed.
Key Points to Identify:
- From the Insect Atlas: estimates put around 90% of all animal species in the world in the insects.
- The first relationship: as pollinator richness increases, pollination success generally increases; pollen actually moving, fruit and vegetables actually setting.
- The second relationship, which runs the same way: more diversity among natural enemies tends to mean greater pest control.
- Diversity of color and form: a male jumping spider using color for a mating display, wing color, and the size gradient across Georgia’s lady beetles; which worldwide runs down to two millimeters, small enough that you would not recognize the larvae as lady beetles.
Review Task 3
Watch: 9:30 – 14:14
Task: Collect Schmidt’s two structural illustrations of what “diversity” means beyond a species count.
Key Points to Identify:
- Life stage: a Geocoris punctipes nymph has no wings and no reproductive parts, so it wanders locally, feeds only on what it can reach, and cannot mate. Both wings and reproductive parts arrive at the final molt.
- Mouthparts, part one: vespid mouthparts in the upper panels are short, rigid, and toothed; the lower panels show very long tongues and extensions. Different structures mean the species are doing different jobs.
- Mouthparts, part two: a large bug’s spear-and-straw that impales prey and drinks the body fluids; chewing, toothed ant mouthparts; the range across a single family of tiger beetles; and a mosquito engorging on blood, the one insect in the set whose job everyone already knows.
Review Task 4
Watch: 14:14 – 18:33
Task: Note what Schmidt says about flight, and where to get the poster he showed.
Key Points to Identify:
- A dragonfly’s head is basically all eyes, which is worth thinking about in terms of how it perceives and responds to the world, a character that carries over into the flies.
- Wing venation varies across taxa and is one of the characters used to identify insects, particularly in the Hymenoptera and the flies. Engineers have borrowed the same structures for micro air vehicles.
- The regional pollinator poster came from the Pollinator Partnership at pollinator.org. Schmidt said the downloads are free, a new one comes out roughly every year, and the organization sent him a large-format file when he asked.
Part Two: Dr. Scott Clem: Flies
Review Task 5
Watch: 18:33 – 23:02
Task: Learn the four characters that separate a fly from a bee or wasp. This is the census-day segment, rewatch it before your count.
Key Points to Identify:
- Count the wings. Flies have one pair, two wings. Bees and wasps have four.
- Flies have very large eyes relative to the body; bees and wasps have small eyes.
- Flies have short antennae, and no scopa, the pollen-collecting basket loaded on a bee’s hind leg.
- Clem ran the comparison on real photos: a honey bee model on the left, a hoverfly mimic on the right. Several flies in this talk mimic bees and wasps.
Review Task 6
Watch: 23:02 – 28:45
Task: Define fly pollination and note when and where to look for it.
Key Points to Identify:
- Myophily is fly pollination, from the Greek myia (fly) and philos (loving). Generalized myophily covers plants that get fly visits among many other pollinators; specialized myophily covers plants with floral traits (usually scent) evolved to pull flies in. Examples: the corpse flower, kettle trap flowers, and Jack-in-the-pulpit here in the Southeast.
- Flies are non-central place foragers. Their larvae live free, so adults are not shuttling back to a nest the way bees and social wasps are.
- Adults are active in cooler parts of the day, mornings and late afternoon, more in the shade, and several species are more abundant in spring and fall.
- Fly larvae make a living in many ways: aquatic filter feeding (the rat-tailed maggot), predation, wood feeding, feeding on dead animals, parasitizing carpenter bees, and forming plant galls.
Review Task 7
Watch: 28:45 – 40:07
Task: Work through the first four of Clem’s five fly groups and note one memorable example from each.
Key Points to Identify:
- Nematocera; mosquitoes, midges, march flies, crane flies. Poor pollinators per visit but so numerous that the total matters. Midges pollinate cacao, which puts a roughly $120 billion chocolate industry on insects two to three millimeters long. Male mosquitoes live almost exclusively on nectar.
- Lower Brachycera, long proboscises built for nectar. Bee flies (Clem’s “flying fuzzballs,” about 150 species in the Southeast, preferring sandy soils), soldier flies, horse flies, and the mydas fly, up to an inch and a half and out in July.
- Calyptrates; house, flesh, and blow flies, defined by the white calypter under the wing. Clem put them among the most abundant pollinators in many systems, especially highly degraded ones, because some species grow fast enough to succeed there. Pawpaws draw them with dark maroon flowers that smell, and some growers bait orchards with “stink stations.”
- Acalyptrates; no calypter, mostly 1–5 mm. Thick-headed flies are the exception at large size: they wait on flowers, catch a bumblebee, and lay an egg on it.
Review Task 8
Watch: 40:07 – 46:05
Task: Separate the two hoverfly subfamilies and note why the difference matters in a yard.
Key Points to Identify:
- Hoverflies (flower flies): about 6,200 species worldwide, around 250 in the Southeast. Adults are almost exclusively pollinators. Clem calls them flying eyeballs.
- Syrphinae: the garden-variety syrphids like Toxomerus marginatus, Toxomerus geminatus, and the fall-abundant Eupeodes americanus. Larvae look like little slugs and eat several hundred aphids apiece over a lifetime.
- Eristalinae; about 65% of hoverfly species, roughly 500 in North America, more often in forested habitat. Larvae feed on dead and decaying material in dead wood and water-filled tree holes. This is where the best mimics sit: Eristalis tenax (the drone fly, mimicking honey bee drones), Spilomyia longicornis (a yellowjacket mimic), and the inch-long Virginia giant hoverfly, loud in flight and nicknamed the news fly.
- The conservation consequence: clear out all the dead and decaying wood and those larvae have nowhere to live.
Review Task 9
Watch: 46:05 – 52:46
Task: Note the migration finding, the Georgia species count, and what Clem told you to plant and read.
Key Points to Identify:
- Hoverflies migrate seasonally, like monarchs. Using stable isotopes, Clem traced flies arriving in the Southeast around August and September to origins thousands of kilometers north, with a presumed northward spring return, which moves pollen across long distances and matters for plant gene flow.
- Working the Georgia Museum of Natural History collection in Athens, he documented at least 158 hoverfly species in Georgia and expects the real number to be 200 or higher.
- Flies visit at least 72% of the world’s crops. In the Southeast that includes canola, carrots, strawberries, blackberries, apples, peaches, onions, peppers, and kiwi.
- Fly-friendly natives to plant: mountain mint, Virginia pepperweed, smartweeds, asters (pink, white, and blue), and blue mistflower.
- Resources named: Common Hoverflies of Georgia (Clem’s recent guide, shared by QR code), the Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America, and his forthcoming chapter “The Unsung Heroes: The Importance of Flies in Wild and Domesticated Pollination.”
Part Three: Gabrielle LaTora: Wasps
Review Task 10
Watch: 52:46 – 1:00:01
Task: Build the wasp identification checklist and learn what an ovipositor does.
Key Points to Identify:
- Classification: kingdom Animalia, phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Hymenoptera, suborder Apocrita, the suborder that separates wasps from the closely related sawflies. Over 100,000 wasp species worldwide, with 10,000 to 20,000 identified in North America.
- The petiole: the narrow “waist” is actually a constriction between the first and second abdominal segments.
- The rest of the checklist: four transparent wings (hooked front to hind, so hard to count in the field), a smooth shiny body with little or no hair, a slender elongated body, and long straight thread-like antennae. LaTora’s friend’s line, wasps look like lady superheroes in catsuits.
- The ovipositor is the egg-laying organ only females have. In wasps it does dual action as the stinger, so anything that stings you is female. Some species curl it inside the body; some bore into bark with it to reach larvae inside trees.
- Fulton County Master Gardener volunteers are hosting census counting events on Saturday, August 22, contact Fulton County Extension for details.
Review Task 11
Watch: 1:00:01 – 1:06:18
Task: Contrast social and solitary wasps, and sketch how a solitary female provisions a nest.
Key Points to Identify:
- Social wasps are a very small fraction of all wasp species. They live in structured nests from a few individuals to thousands, with a caste system: queens reproduce, workers build and forage and tend brood, and a small number of males mate. Almost all are vespids, and they are the ones that turn aggressive when the nest feels threatened.
- Solitary wasps are the vast majority, and the ones you will mostly see on flowers during a census. Females work alone. They are not aggressive and generally sting only when squeezed; into an armpit, or under an arm on a chair.
- The three steps LaTora numbered: build the nest cell; capture and paralyze insect prey and carry it back; then place the prey in the cell, lay one egg on or near it, and seal the cell. The larva develops on the paralyzed prey. Her line for the mother’s part in it: “I gave you some food. Good luck.”
- Nest types: underground burrows (cicada killers), mud pots and organ-pipe tubes hung near the eaves, and empty plant cavities used by grass-carrying wasps.
Review Task 12
Watch: 1:06:18 – 1:10:54
Task: Pin down the predator/parasitoid distinction and what to do about a hornworm in your tomatoes.
Key Points to Identify:
- Predator wasps hunt insects but the adults do not eat them; they carry prey back to the nest as larval food. Some specialize (caterpillars, spiders); many are generalists taking whatever they can carry.
- A parasitoid develops in or on a host insect and the host dies; in a parasitism the host usually does not. Between 60 and 80% of wasp species are parasitoids, usually tied to one host species or a small group of close relatives.
- The size range runs from the smallest known insect on Earth, a parasitoid of a louse, needing a dissecting scope to see, up to ichneumonids three or four inches long that drill through bark to reach wood-boring beetle larvae.
- Cotesia congregata parasitizes tomato and tobacco hornworms. LaTora was emphatic that the small objects on a parasitized hornworm are cocoons and pupae, not eggs, the larvae fed inside the caterpillar and tunneled out to build them. Her advice: leave it alone. The caterpillar is nearly finished, and 30 or 40 harmless wasps will emerge hunting more hornworms.
Review Task 13
Watch: 1:10:54 – 1:14:57
Task: Answer two questions in your own words: why do wasps visit flowers at all, and how do you tell a wasp from a fly at a glance? Rewatch before census day.
Key Points to Identify:
- Reproduction is energy-expensive, especially for a solitary female doing everything herself. Adults stop at flowers for sugar; nectar, plant sap, and honeydew, which LaTora called our euphemism for bug poop and described as insect Red Bull.
- Pollination is incidental. Pollen sticks to the body, legs, and mouthparts, but with little hair wasps are not efficient at it even though they visit many flowers.
- Wasp: long thread-like antennae, hairless, constricted petiole, four wings, and a head shaped like a hammerhead shark, elongated horizontally with small eyes toward the ends.
- Fly: two wings held out at about 45 degrees like an airplane, bristly rather than fuzzy hair, a semicircular dome-shaped head with “pancake eyes” covering most of it, and two short stubby antennae arising between the eyes, often with a little club and one bristle.
Part Four: Closing Q&A
Review Task 14
Watch: 1:14:57 – 1:20:45
Task: Note the audience questions and where LaTora drew a line on what is known.
Key Points to Identify:
- The sting is a defense mechanism; LaTora’s phrasing was “we think that it’s a defense mechanism.” She tied it to the warning coloration common across wasps, red and black, white and black, yellow and black, and to why fly mimicry works: flies that carry the same warning colors get eaten less and leave more offspring.
- Parasitized hornworms do keep feeding for a while, but slow down and develop necrotic patches. If the feeding damage bothers you, move the caterpillar to a wooded area; once the cocoons are visible on the outside, it is nearly dead.
- Hornets are a small group of wasps.
- Wasps carry pollen incidentally, on the body, legs, and mouthparts, across a wide size range from tiny species up to paper wasps.
- Hymenoptera larvae have no common name the way beetle grubs and fly maggots do, because we almost never see them; they are inside nests. On the small nest with two to four wasps and no visible larvae, LaTora’s answer was conditional: it depends where the nest is, and with potter or organ pipe wasps you would not see larvae at all. Look a little closer; if there is nothing there, the wasps are probably still gathering resources to reproduce.
- Two answers in this segment were left open on air: whether non-queen social wasp females are sterile, and why wasps hook their wings together. Griffin closed the second by saying they would confirm it later. Do not treat either as settled.
Verification
- The fourteen prompts tile the full 1:20:45 runtime with no gaps and no overlaps, from 0:00 to 1:20:45.
- Every key point traces to specific subtitle blocks in the corrected SRT; the segment boundaries fall on presenter handoffs and slide transitions in the transcript.
- Prompt 14 flags the two Q&A answers the speakers themselves left unresolved, so course developers do not build assessment on them.
- No key point introduces information from outside the presentation.
Moodle activities produced for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course · gsepc.org
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-21_FliesAndWasps.srt (282 blocks); Archive Package (Stage 2)