What are Wasps?
Wasps are in the same family as saw flies, bees, bumble bees, parasitic wasps, paper wasps, mud wasps, social wasps, and ants.
Together, they are the third largest group of insects – after beetles and butterflies.
The wasp family is called HYMENOPTERA
This is made from two Greek words: hymen-o-ptera, which means married wings – two on each side, connected by a series of hooks, called hamuli or sometimes called the frenulum.
They have a very narrow waist between their thorax and their abdomen.
They can be gigantic, like the giant Japanese hornet.
The venom from the Japanese hornet is so potent that with just a few stings it has been known to kill humans.
Or wasps can be stunning with metallic bodies like the giant tarantula hawk wasp below.
They are the second most painful stinging insects in the world.
If you are stung by the tarantula hawk wasp, it can drop you to your knees in what is described as “instant electrifying pain” – Justin Smidtt.
They can be microscopic, like the fairy wasps.
The smallest winged insects – the fairy wasps are parasites, they lay their eggs inside the eggs of other small insects and live for only a few days. Sometimes the males live for only a few hours and die shortly after mating.
They are called fairy flies or fairy wasps due to their feathery wings and miniscule size.
Many wasps are social and live in colonies, or nests made out of paper.
Wasp nests start out as a tiny egg cup sized umbrella with three or four cells, inside of which the first grubs are hatched and fed. Once they are mature, they fly off and forage and take over the building of the nest and the queen focusses on egg laying.
Large nests can contain many layers of delicate hexagonal paper cells and up to ten thousand wasps. In America and other warmer countries, the nests keep going and can have multiple queens and even hundreds of thousands of workers. These nests are very dangerous.
Wasps nest in a variety of places. It all depends upon where the emerging queen wasp choses to build. Sometimes they are in a loft, where they can grow to quite a size, sometimes they are built underground.
Asian hornet nests are always made in bushes. If you see them, you must contact your local authority who will arrange for them to be professionally removed – do not attempt to do this yourself.
Don’t confuse this nest with our scarce native tree wasp which nests a lot higher up and builds a smaller nest.
The largest of the native UK species of wasp is the European hornet, Vespa crabro, with lengths up to 2.4 cm.
We do have a few more wasps that live in big colonies (eusocial wasps) in the form of Vespula rufa – the red wasp, Dolichovespula media – the Norwegian wasp, Dolichovespula saxonica – the saxon wasp, and Dolichovespula sylvestris – the tree wasp. Each of these are distinguishable from one another by examining their malar spaces, and colouration and patterning of the abdomen. Telling the difference between V. germanica and the common wasp is easy with markings, as well as the smaller V. vulgaris.
German Wasp
Vespula germanica
Common Wasp
Vespula vulgaris
Tree Wasp
Dolichovespula
silvestris
Red Wasp
Vespula rufa
Norwegian
Wasp
Dolichovespula media
Saxon Wasp
Dolichovespula saxonica
German Wasp faces are variable, they can have just three spots, or two and a larger blob.
In the UK, there are approximately 9000 species of wasp (saw fly, parasitic, and social) with the commonest social species being Vespula vulgaris (common wasp) and Vespula germanica (German wasp).
INVADER ALERT
The Asian Hornet
Vespa velutina
Since 2016, the Asian hornet has been attempting to gain foothold.
It is bad news for bees, it will still catch and kill them on the wing, chew them up and take the bodies back to their nest to feed to their grubs.
Also known as the yellow legged hornet, it has spread rapidly from South-East Asia, where it hunts the Eastern honey bees, Apis cerana, who have evolved clever defences against their attackers – like rapidly flying in and out of their hives when they detect the hornets.
The workers will hide in the hive, and the guard bees distract the hornets by holding and angling their wings in the sun (called shimmering).
If a hornet lands on the bees’ hive, or tries to get in, the bees will swarm and clump around the invader. They vibrate their wing muscles to generate friction heat to within a fraction of a degree of their own tolerance and literally cook the naughty hornets to death, often at the cost of a few of their sisters along the way.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!