wasps
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Blue Wings To Die For
The Great Black Wasp (Sphex pensylvanicus) is a katydid and grasshopper hunter. As with the spider hunters and others I’ve been detailing this summer, the prey provisions the nests of their young. In between wrestling paralyzed katydids to the nest, these wasps sup on nectar. Like most solitary wasps, this generation never see their progeny…
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Wasps
It is the season of wasps. Seen on a walk through Prospect Park this week:The very elegant Isodontia elegans, one of the grass-carrying wasps, and evidently a species without a common name. The grass they clip and carry is used to line their nests, which are made in pre-existing cavities. They eat pollen themselves and…
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Hymenoptera
Last weekend, I visited the Flatbush Gardener’s garden. The highlight was the mountain mint, alive with pollinators. I mean, jumping with pollinators: several species of bees, wasps, flies, and butterflies going at it. Here are a couple of the highlights: Great Golden Digger Wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus.One of the grass-carrying wasps of genus Isodontia. Cuckoo bee,…
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Mud Cells
Two summers ago, a Black and Yellow Mud Dauber wasp built her nest in the Back 40 (inches). A new generation of these large, black-bodied wasps with yellow legs emerged in June of last year. This year I had one inside the house. Not here in Brooklyn, but at the family house in Massachusetts. This…
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Dog Days
Yesterday, I heard two cicadas whining at the northern end of the Promenade. These were my first of the year. Today I heard one in the back of the apartment, way back, beyond the Back 40 Inches. On a walk through the neighborhood, I spotted a couple of the huge cicada killer wasps (Sphecius speciosus)…
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Pollinators
I took a walk through Brooklyn Bridge Park yesterday afternoon. It was very windy, which made photographing flying insects quite a challenge. I saw my first Monarch butterflies of the year, as well as an American Lady. Black Saddlebags dragonfly. Great Northern Bumblebee (amongst a host of small, medium, and large bumblebees I am otherwise…
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Vespidae
This queen Eastern Yellowjacket, Vespula maculifrons, is recognizable by the “free spots” on her abdomen segments. That, and the thickness of her abdomen. The workers and males of the species lack the spots. A female European Paper Wasp, Polistes dominula, a native of Eurasia now quite wide-spread in North America. Both of these wasps were…
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Neighbors
A paper nest made by Bald-faced hornets, Dolichovespula maculata. Found a block down the street from the Back 40. It’s quite empty this time of year. Next year’s already mated females are somewhere nearby, tucked into over-wintering nooks, hoping to become queens of new colonies/nests. They will not reuse this nest. Here’s a these Bald-faced…
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Two wasps
Both of these were spotted in Central Park:Bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata). These are the social wasps that make the large, football-shaped paper nests you see in trees, especially in winter. The nests are completely inactive in winter and unused the following year. The wasp is chewing the old wood of this tree; it’s how they…
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Return of the Prodigal?
A Black-and-Yellow Mud Dauber, Sceliphron caementarium, in the Back 40 today while I was watering parched plants. It was checking out the moist concrete, perhaps looking for a drink or some mud. I’ve noticed these wasps since the local nest started erupting last month, but they are very brief visitors. They probably don’t go far,…
Backyard and Beyond 