Man, those are awesome pics!
It's a shame I just hate those stupid animals ... AFAIK they don't contribute anything to this world except for beging darn annoying and just stining ppl for looking funny at them...
Dennis - I agree with you 100%. I HATE being stung by them since I'm semi allergic to their venom.
Sometimes the common wasp Vespula Vulgaris build their hives in the ground and for some reason these seem to be more aggressive and those can chase you for a mile if they get real mad.
Vespa Crabro is pretty neat though. The females can reach up to 5 cm body lenght!
Part of the reason they are so mean is that they are drunk a good part of the year. Since they eat rotting fruit, it's like drinking alcohol from the source.
Paper wasps (like in Jake's pictures) are pretty mild mannered unless you get real close to the nest. The only time they cause a real problem is when they build thier nest on something you have to move later.
Unless I'm mistaken, Larsens' picture is of a queen hornet starting her nest. They can be very aggresive, of course, but if the nest is sufficiently far away from human activity, they can actually be very benificial. They are aggressive predators of all sorts of pest insects, including flies and mosquitos.
The first picture is a queen of what they call here in south Jersey
a yellow hornet. We have alot of them around here. They are often mistaken for yellow jackets and act very simular. In NC near the coast, they call them sand hill hornets. Here where I live, they tend to build their nests inside of the walls of homes, under porches, in attics etc. Usually they are in areas where they don't bother people or you don't know they are there. Late one fall I ended up having a bunch of them flying in the house because babies had hatched and found there way into where it was warm. They don't seem to act natsy like the white faced hornets, but will defend their nests just as ferousiously if disturbed. They just are scarey because they are a lot larger then a yellow jacket except for some of the workers as the summer goes on. They make round covered paper nests like the white faced hornets. It was neat to see a picture of the queen just beginning her nest
like that. I watched a white faced hornet starting hers once above someones doorway. Once day nothing is there and the next they have the round nest hanging there. They had to kill her of course. Don't want them that close know matter how beneficial they can be at killing insects. Besides hornets give me nightmares.
Sharon
Navaros, I didn't know that the wasps get drunk on the fruit that they eat? I've seen many different wasps eating concorde grapes from grape vines, and the ones on the ground. You know they are gorging themselves. They usually act kind of dopey in the fall when it starts to get cold, but I never thought of them as being drunk from the fruit. I do hate them too, am afraid of them, but find myself watching them sometimes in spite of my fear.
Sharon
Anyone ever tried captively propagating any of these things? We started wasps in my insect behaviour course the other day and I was musing on this very point.
I have thought about it a few times actually. Mainly a colony of bees so I could breed velvet ants. heh Wasps would probably be pretty easy as far as keeping goes since they dont all have HUGE colonies. At the liberty science center near NY they have a HUGE bee colony, it's really cool how they did it. It's like a "tarantularium" but much bigger. A few inches deep a couple feet long and high and all closed up with probably a screen somewhere for ventilation. on one side there is a PVC pipe sticking out the wall leading outside where the bees can fly outside to get food and then fly back through the pipe into the hive.
Considering how touchy wasps and hornets can be, rearing them would be pretty dicey propsition. It would be interesting to try and set up an observatinal nest like they do with bees.
Actually many entomologists that have studied social wasps have successfully kept them in observation "hives". Apparently Polistes paper wasps are not that difficult, but vespula, dolichovespula, and vespa wasps are very difficult. I have tried keeping polistes fuscatus, but failed on my first attempt, but I know what I did wrong, but now I could not attempt to try again for awhile, because I live in an apartment.
Those pictures fill me with a gut wrenching near terror. LOL.
I'm deathly alaergic to them. But findtem to be extremly interesting and rather beautiful.
Took Years to come to that conclusion.
One of the big parks here had yellow jackets (forgive my lack of proper name. ) successfuly living in a glass structure that that could come nd go form an outside door thing. So you could get up close and personal.
Oi did that make me cringe. But I visited alot so i could view them differently, then say, screaming in terror and runing away....
I really do not have the time, but if I have the chance I will dig through my stacks of journal articles and try to find the rearing article for Polistes and give you the reference.
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