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Read before you start gagging and throwing away your delicious figs.The botanical definition of a fruit is the mature ovary of a plant, which means that technically figs are not fruits. They are indeed inverted flowers or an inflorescence (that turns into an infructescense) if you’re feeling fancy. A tiny queen of fig wasp can make its way into a fig, lay her eggs and die there. “Once inside, the queen travels within the chamber, depositing her eggs and simultaneously shedding the pollen she carried with her from another fig. This last task, while not the queen’s primary goal, is an important one: She is fertilizing the fig’s ovaries. After the queen has laid her eggs, she dies and is digested by the fig, providing nourishment. Once the queen’s eggs hatch, male and female wasps assume very different roles. They first mate with each other (yes, brothers and sisters), and then the females collect pollen—in some species, actively gathering it in a specialized pouch and in others, accumulating it inadvertently—while the wingless males begin carving a path to the fig’s exterior. This activity is not for their own escape but rather to create an opening for the females to exit. The females will pollinate another fig as queens. The males will spend their entire lifecycle within a single fruit.”Every bit of wasp inside a fig will be absorbed by the fig because it contains ficain, an enzyme, capable of digesting animal proteins.If you’re still uneasy by the idea of wasps in your fig, fear not. That mostly applies to figs that are not commercially cultivated. The figs that you buy at the supermarket don’t contain bits of wasp and never did. The figs that are sold to the public come from trees that don’t rely on wasp pollination, in fact some varieties don’t require pollination at all like Kadota, Brown Turkey, Celeste, Adriatic and Mission figs. Enjoy your figs in peace. https://www.esa.org/esablog/2011/05/20/the-story-of-the-fig-and-its-wasp/