Insect Picture of the Day

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Andrew Lin can make even Polistes dominulus look good.

No seriously. Here’s the wallpaper to prove it.

Andrew says that oregano grows like a weed in Sacramento. I must admit, it’s a very pretty weed.

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Some of you may have noticed that I’ve run a lot of pictures from Jeremiah Fargo lately. There’s a very good reason for you to notice this. It’s because I’ve been running a lot of pictures from Jeremiah Fargo lately.

This is our good friend¹ Polistes dominulus, the European Paper Wasp. This is a queen tending her first brood of the year. You can see the eggs have changed to a milky color compared to the eggs I photographed a few days ago. It also looks like she’s provided some nectar or other form of nutrient goo for the larvae when they hatch. Hey, she may not be a great neighbor, but at least she’s a decent mom.

Thanks, Jer!

¹ If by “good” you understand me to mean “not so great, actually”

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The paper wasps have been out in force the past couple of weeks, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen any thriving nests. Most queens should have popped their first generation of workers by now, but this nest and another outside my front door are still in the Phase 1 building plan.

I’ve watched these two queens, and their behavior is fascinating. For one thing, they hide behind their nest for much of the day. This seemed odd to me because in the fall you can’t get near a nest without a couple of wasps flicking up their wings and staring you down aggressively. I suppose this makes sense, however. If you stumble across the nest, the queen can fly away and start another one, but if the queen picks a fight with you and loses, her entire generation is lost. It’s a matter of colony survival that makes the queens behave, at least at this point, slightly docile.

I have not tested this theory by approaching the nest and seeing if she’ll sting me or flee, mind you.

Cool thing about this picture: Can you see the eggs? You may need to check out the larger version.

For those of you who like the geometric pattern here, I made wallpaper. Enjoy!

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James Newman makes his debut on InsectPOD today with this great photo of a stingless wasp. He has this to say about it:

Last night (or perhaps this morning, judging by timestamps (I couldn’t sleep)), we had our windows open to cool down cheaply, and had a guest fly in. My wife at first thought it was another mayfly, but after watching it, and seeing it land, I figured out that it was a parasitic wasp of some sort….

Either way, after the photos were taken, my compassionate wife asked if I would kill it now. I begged off, it being late, and me not knowing if it could sting (I believe i found that it couldn’t). Later found a jar and transported it outside.

Thank for for sending this in, James! Great picture. And on behalf of solitary wasps everywhere, thank you for releasing it outside.

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You know that Spanish phrase, “Mi casa es su casa”? Well, I never said that to Polistes dominulus, but here she is taking me up on that offer, chewing up my deck to expand her nest. In this picture, you are looking straight down the back of my deck at my lawn. I nailed up a tiny strip of 1/8″ plywood a few years ago to support, of all things, a wasp trap.

Oh, the irony.

A couple of cool things to notice about this pic (you may need the larger version to see these):

1. The spiky cleats inside her knees. Yikes!
2. She’s torn up most of a spitball from the deck already. The gray mass just visible behind her front leg is shredded wood (paper, hence the name!) that she’ll use to build up her nest.

I don’t know if this is a queen or a worker. What I do know is that there is evidence of my bug-fascinated insanity dating back to 2005, with this post by my wife: My husband is NUTS. The wasp trap mentioned in that post is the very same one I had clipped to that piece of plywood.

In the comments to that article, I posted a photograph of me handling the trap. I’ve copied it over here to insectpod for your viewing pleasure. (The maniac is the one on the right.) This photo was taken after I had captured about half the wasps I would get that day; I ended up with 32-33 wasps, at 5 of which were queens, based on the way they would clump up at night.

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OH HAI. Hay ’sup? I see whut you did there. I have never had so many lolbugesque captions be suggested by a single photograph! Ceiling wasp does not approve. I can has nectar? Aggressive wasp is aggressive….

Jeremiah took this photo while touring a house he was about to rent.

I should point out that this was one of about four wasps he saw while touring the house. In the middle of Winter in New England¹. He says he’s no longer living in the house, which is probably just as good as this was a good sign that they’re in the walls.

Unfortunately I can’t tell my wasps apart real well yet. From side angles in other photos Jeremiah sent in, this might be Polistes dominulus, the European paper wasp, but the reddish eyes and face make me lean more towards red paper wasp. It’s probably for the best if so; red paper wasps are much less aggressive. I’ve read several reports of humans peacefully coexisting with paper wasps; the one case of “I had to destroy the nest” I read about came when they built their nest right above a door jamb. Going through the door would startle the wasps, and with the owner’s head a foot away from the (recently startled) nest, he got stung two or three times before deciding to knock the nest down. By contrast, another wasp nest was just four feet to the side of that one, and he never had trouble from them.

Thanks, Jeremiah, for another great photo!

¹ Help me out here geographywise: is there a proper delineation for “New England”, and if so, does it include Delaware²? I recently suggested to someone that Pennsylvania was in New England and oh my did I find out I was wrong. It’s sort of like jellyfish gender, “only they can tell the difference” but boy, can they tell the difference.

² This just in: No.

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We have reader Cornelius to thank again for another beautifully-composed shot of a hard-to-identify insect! I love this photo. I could have cropped it in really close to zoom in on the bug but I really like the layout and color contrast of this shot. In fact, if you’d like a gigantic version of it for wallpaper (or just for getting really close to that bug, you can click here).

I must appeal to our wiser readers for an identification on this bug. The wing coloration seems like it should indicate a solitary wasp. Wing coloration is often too broad for identification, however, and the shape of the abdomen and waist is more commonly found in social wasps.

So, I dunno. I know it’s a pretty one, and that’s about it. Thanks again, Cornelius!

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(EDIT: Reader John Gilmore points out that ants have jointed antennae, and this bug does not. This is not an ant at all, but a wasp! Had I known this, I would NOT have been so bold to handle it! I have recategorized the image, but have left the title and post alone. This just further goes to show that I’m not an entomologist. The original, and wildly inaccurate, post follows.)

Queens were flying out here a couple of months ago, and this tiny one flew into the house. She’s just mated and is looking for a place to settle down. (Unless she’s a male and he’s done his job and waiting to die.) She’s about 4mm long: that’s my pinky finger.

I don’t know the species, but she’s the right size for the various Myrmica species we get out here, like these.

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Well, the paper wasps have finally given up for the year. This one was huddled near the ground on the trash can a few weeks ago. This may be a recently mated queen that stopped to get out of the wind for the evening while searching for a good spot to overwinter. Males will often accompany the queens if possible, huddling around her to keep her warm, so it may simply be that this is just a worker wasp that couldn’t find its way back to the nest for the night.

Either way, the paper wasps are all hunkered down for the winter. Time for me to get out and knock down all the nests. The next year’s crop will just build new nests, but if I don’t knock them down, they’ll reuse the old nests, expanding them even larger. I have one nest about 30 feet up where I can’t get it that’s the size of a football and growing every year.

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This 2cm European paper wasp stopped on my brickwork for a quick photo. They’re still active out here this time of year, huddling for warmth to get through the nearly freezing nights, and then resuming activity during the period of warmth in the afternoon that gets shorter and shorter each day.

October in Utah is a month that generally starts out warm, with lazy Autumn afternoons or even the occasional hot burst of Indian Summer. But you always want a warm Halloween costume if you’re going to be outside, because October ends with freezing nights and cold days.

Yesterday I couldn’t go out on my back deck because it was swarming with dozens of paper wasps, diligently chewing my redwood deck to shreds for nest material. For a moment I thought the new queens were finally flying. This always creates swarms on the porch, but the wasps weren’t dancing and mating; they were just looking for more wood to chew up and carry off. I am surprised that I haven’t seen the queens fly yet this year; I may have missed it.

I’ll keep my eyes open–and camera handy–in case they’re going to fly late this year. The new queens hatch, fly off in a mating flight, and then find a good place to hibernate. They overwinter and start new nests in the Spring.