While we've always been curious, this spring my husband and I have really gotten into identification of the many pollinators and insects that are now visiting our garden. This little black and white bugger really had us fooled, and while I didn't get the 1000% focus on it, you can see that it's got little black and white stripes.
We thought it was a kind of bee, but turns out it's not! It's a hoverfly, which makes sense, considering how it 'hovers' around flowers, kind of like a helicopter. It's also known as a flower fly, and for good reason - it's been paying close attention to our daikon radish blooms as you can see here, but are less about the pollen (like bees), and while they inadvertently help fertilize through their visits to flower gardens, turns out they are far more about aphids and other bugs that drive gardeners absolutely crazy.
Hoverflies' larvae (yep, maggots), feed off aphids. In fact, as WhatsThatBug explains, "Each larva can consume hundreds of aphids during its development."
So don't give ladybugs all the credit, these fellas are doing the hard work - with a less colorful outfit.
Yep a journey away from my old thought that it wasn't obviously a honeybee or bumblebee or regular fly it was a pest. Yay hover flies