It’s officially National Pollinators Week! Join us for a weeklong celebration of the plants and animals that carry pollen. Plus we’re sharing ways you can help local pollinators too. This week, each coloring page is highlighting a different pollinator and showcases the hard work they do for Ohio plants and wildlife.

Wasps tend to get a bad rap, especially in comparison to their bee cousins. But wasps are just important to the environment as predators and pollinators.

How can predators be beneficial to the environment? Wasps are live pest control. According to National Geographic, nearly every pest insect on Earth is preyed upon by a wasp species, either for food or as a host for their parasitic larvae. But other species of wasps are quite important to certain plant species.

In the subfamily Masarinae, pollen wasps gather nectar and pollen in a crop inside their bodies (rather than on body hairs like bees), and pollinate flowers of Penstemon and the water leaf family, Hydrophyllaceae.

Do you enjoy figs? You can thank wasps for that. Fig wasps, the Agaonidae family, are the only pollinators of nearly 1,000 species of figs, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

Get more coloring pages here!