It’s found from southern Canada south to Guatemala and is sometimes (but not universally) called the Common TwW. Thread-waisted Wasp #2< may be Ammophila procera (the TwW with silver racing stripes on its thorax). For a nice article about this wasp by the co-author of the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America. In one of the attached pictures of the wasp #1 near her tunnel, she has backed out of the tunnel holding a ball of soil between her front legs. It lives in the eastern half of the U.S., where it collects a lot of cutworm caterpillars for its young (think corn earworm). In Latin, pictus = painted and pennis = feather and may refer to the insect’s painted wing). Thread-waisted Wasp #1 may be Ammophila pictipennis (a TwW whose orange wings have black tips that get lighter as they age/wear). When it’s time for a little shut-eye, Ammophila wasps grab a stem with their mandibles, fold their legs, and sleep, supported only by their strong jaws. It overwinters in its cell and emerges as an adult in spring. of a typical parasitoid, eating its caterpillar slowly, keeping it alive by leaving the vital organs until last.
Scholars debate about whether this tool-using behavior is instinctive, insightful, trial-and-error, or intelligent. Then she refills the hole, compacting the dirt and concealing the disturbance by pressing on the soil with a small pebble that she holds in her jaws. Once home, she stuffs the paralyzed (but not dead) caterpillar into the burrow and lays an egg on it, thus providing her larva with a nutritious start in life. A large caterpillar “flying” through the air suspended by a much smaller wasp is a startling sight. Most Ammophilas target the caterpillars of moths and a few skipper butterflies and the larvae of their distant sawfly relatives. When the burrow is finished, she conceals its entrance and goes hunting. The resulting vibrations “drill” the dirt loose like a mini jack hammer, and a soft buzzing can be heard as she works. Using her mandibles as earth-movers, a female Ammophila digs an unbranched burrow for her eggs-but first, with her head pressed against the soil, she quivers her flight muscles. They average about an inch long and often have orange on their abdomens (females have more orange than males). You can find Ammophila wasps everywhere that has grassland/garden flowers to nectar on and a suitable substrate for digging a nest hole in (i.e. The first thing you discover when you Google Ammophila is that it’s the genus name both for some TwWs and for a few species of beach grasses, including one that is native to the Atlantic coast and the shores of the Great Lakes. They might be Ammophila pictipennis, Ammophila procera, and Eremnophila aureonotata.Īmmophila is Greek for sand lover. TwWs can be hard to identify with photos alone, but the BugLady thinks she has three species of wasps in two genera here, photographed in Wisconsin and New Jersey. Although the female is primarily a vegetarian that sips nectar from flowers as she hunts, she provides protein for her young (and she’s not above consuming some juices from the invertebrates she collects). Sphecids mostly nest in the ground or build free-standing nests from mud. Their various common names, like sand wasp, digger wasp, mud wasp, hunting wasp, caterpillar-hunter, and cicada killer tell us where they hang out and what they do. Many members of the order have a “pinched” or “stalked” waist ( petiole), but some members of the family Sphecidae, the Thread-waisted wasps (TwWs), carry that to extremes with a long, skinny “petiole” followed by a long, skinny abdomen. They’ve been around for more than 200 million years, appearing with the first dinosaurs and out-lasting them social behavior developed a mere 144 to 65 million years ago. It’s a huge order, with 130,000 species “on the books” and many other species waiting in the wings to be discovered and described.
We’re doing a little science here.ĭespite the conspicuousness of ant hills and wasp nests and honeybee hives created by the social members of the order Hymenoptera, the majority of ants, bees and wasps (and sawflies and horntails) are solitary.
Sit back and put your feet up-this is a tale that takes a bit of telling.
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