Endless Forms By Seirian Sumner describes the extraordinary Life Cycle of a wasp: Life freezing venom, a single sting renders their victim as putty in their mandible. No room for nurture. Wasp waist.
Frequent literary /art / film references, usually negative, ‘beware of waspish behaviour’ shakespear, metaphore for evil – perpetuated their reputation. Ian Banks the Wasp Factory. Unlike the honey bee. The Survey: Good news for bees. All scored bees positive emotionally – honey buzz, pollinators. Wasps a mirror image, negative emotion, sting, useless. Monster wasp v blessed bee. We are products of our culture.
Yellow Jacket wasps,
Hover wasp, long and slender wasp waist. A Yoga move unites her mouth with anus.
Wasps belong to Hymenoptera, bees and ants. 150,000 species known, wasps make up 80%, 5 times more than bee, 7 times more than ants. Most commonly described the yellow jackets.
Paracetoid wasps – the most diverse, perform essential role in ecosystems. Some are engineered and released to crops to keep down caterpillar pests. They lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other anthropods sooner or later causing the death of these hosts. Some live off the paracetoid wasps, the endless forms.
Evolution: How some lost their wings and became ants, some became vegetarian (bees), some found waists. The evolutionary history has had to be re-written recently many times. Wasp tree of life:
Insects 479 million years old – oldest land animals.
130 million – insects with metamorphosis, Holometabolous
280 million years ago – first hymenoptera, was a wasp. First vegetarian without a sting, like sawflies – stumpy, fierce and functional.
240 million years ago – some developed a taste for meat. Big schism. Parasitic sawflies, lost some sense of smell.
247 million years ago, another group – Parasitoid wasp became flesh eaters. . Wasp waist, shedding the clumsy sawfly wasp. Acrobatic and nimble. Hightened sense of smell and vibration. Tweaked ovipositor to deliver venum along with an egg. Special relationship with a virus that is injected into the host. All makings of perfect love story of symbiosis.
Some have reverted to vegetarian origin, and many relate to fig. The fig provides the cosy nursary. Fig benefits with pollen carriage. Gall wasps, cause nodules to grow on trees. The growth of the gall under the control of the wasp. No benefit to the plant. Robin’s pincushion is a red, round, hairy growth that can be seen on wild roses. It is caused by the larvae of a tiny gall wasp that feeds on the host plant, but causes little damage.
190 million years ago, The sting finally arrived. Straightforward modification of the ovipositer. Became a hardened weapon, a life giver became a life taker. The venum sack became an essential addition. More than a weapon, a medicinal syringe. The social wasps, Yellow Jackets or Hornets, kills with her mandibles. Sting is defensive. Hover wasps and paper wasps – natures award wining soap operas: what keeps a co-operative society in tact.
100 million years ago, the social wasp which lost it’s wings, ants evolved. Only male has wings, mates and dies. All ant species are social. An awful lot of ants.
124 million years ago, one day a wasp forgot how to hunt and developed a taste for pollen, so became bees. A vegetarian version of wasps. Same time as evolving plants.
Jean Henri Fabre – the great writer on wasps 1890
1/6 Sceliphron sp., common name – Mud dauber wasp, hunts spiders. Stars in many books. 1963 book wasp farm, 1918 devoted chapter to Sceleiphron. Up to 20 spiders into a brood chamber. Diverse species. Fed the wasp baby more spiders – lavea died of over eating.
Pompilidae = spider-hunting wasps. Fabre was intrigued and set up observation chamber. Ponbilides hunt before they build their nest. Some in waiting are stollen.
The Stiletto. Only the stings of social wasps. Only honey bees leave their sting in. Egg laying aparatus ovipositor turned into a weaponised killing machine. The use of the sting as a backpack – the assasins backpack.
The venom has to be powerful. The pray is sometimes 15 times the body weight of the solitary wasp. Little known until 1950’s. Active ingredients, proteins. Used now for treating arthritis, and even tumor therapies. Bee and wasp share many constituents, histomene, seratonian proteins. Bees only use venom in defense, Wasps are hunters. Does venom vary depending catapillar or spider? 1980s began dissecting venom. Became known as Wasp Kinins, bradykinin-related peptides (BRPs), they give the hunter the power to know victim paralised. An effective numbing of the insects neuro system. Not all wasps have these. Interestingly same as pesticides such as neonicotinoids – mimicing the solitary wasp.
Also Mastoparan (Mastoparan is a peptide toxin found in the venom of many species of wasps), cause most famous is the zombification of american cockroach by jewel wasp. She delivers 2 stings, temporarily paralising front legs. 2nd into brain. Transforms the roach into a zombie slave, and she leads him to his cave tomb. Alive enough to remain fresh and juicy for baby wasp to enjoy.
3/7 European Bee Wolf. JeanHenri Fabre put Bee Wolf and Bee in bell chamber to witness the hunt. Dufer, the anticeptic expert, recognised there must be some preservative, to keep the body in tact for a period of time. Fabre however did not go with this, also an anti Darwin evolutionist. Once sealed their living larder, what stops the victim from deteriorating, is a smorgesboard of chemicals. Bee wolfs have made a surprising contribution to our understanding of antibiotics. The Bee wolf mum excretes streptomice bacteria from her gland openings between her antenea and deposits it onto the wall of babies cocoon. These helpful bacteria kill any fungi inside the cacoon. When emerged it spreads it around its nursary. Male Bee wolf lack the gland – sex specific parental care. Discovered in 2005. In addition the lavea emits nitrous oxide, an antimicrobial agent. Magic combination of fumigation and embalming.
4/9 How to move a catalillar, 15 times size. Where to kill? Which segment? Has to be several times. Digger Wasp research 1899 observations, Wisconsin.
5/ 18 Wintering Diapours
eg Potter Wasp. Solitary bees Instead of hibernating as adults after a season on the wing, the females mate and lay eggs in their nest cells towards the end of spring. When the grubs hatch, they stay in the cell right through the summer, feeding on stores of pollen left by the female bee. By the end of autumn, the grubs will have pupated and matured into adult bees, but they don’t emerge just yet. They hibernate in their cocoons until the following spring, when they’ll emerge to feed from early blooms.
Two types: Same season brood, have to develop quickly. Diapoursing brood. Trigger may be day length.
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6 the puzzle of altruism. I am going to rock the boat of the text book darlings … with disturbing news – these disputatious wasps sometimes flout the rules of altruism with bravado.
Wasps share help with distant relatives not always family group. Spread the load like investment banker, buffering failure of any single fund. drifting behaviour. Wasps drifted more to nests needed. Likelyhood of whole nest attacked eg army ants in Panama . (12 years after Ts research) as the number of wasps increases in a colony their usefulness diminishes. Extended altruism. Environmental volatility. Reduces chance of loss, like a broker . Different strategies for gene propergation. Polisties wasps
5 Aristotle
Aristotle first published entomologist known for bees. Less well known his work with wasps. Eg yellow jacket and hornet. He understood caste system. Got it wrong with bees. Iminagery Invite him back for dinner to share thoughts on shared pleasures in wasps. Females can carry arms and be defenders.
That classroom darling the honey bee. 8 species but one we know best is … honey key ingredient in Egyptian cooking, 4000 years ago. Many books on bees testament to our fascination with bees. Like bees, single queen keeps rule of law. Effective foragers. Use feramons to communicate. Behaviour similar in purpose. Natural selection. Bees edited evolved from wasps.
Honey bees longest lived insects can live for 20 years. Colonies can live for years.
Wasp annual cycle. Young mated queen builds first cells lays some eggs provisions with pray which she hunts herself. Bee never does this. She becomes an egg laying matriarch as honey bee. Never leaves next again creates nest. worker offspring lay kore worker siblings. After a few thousand Next queen lays sexual broad. The queen, workers And male offspring Early autumn will all die. Newly mated sexual female sole survivors. They will be the founders of next season colony.
genius of nest construction. Like bee hexigan architecture. Minimising space. Build out of plant material. Hexagonal theme. Begins gathering wood pulp. Wasps first paper maker. Old Chinese story. The first cell is the most challenging. Unlike the bee a round wax remoulded with 3 together. All further cells need only 3 walls. Simple alegrbra. The paper envelope to form cloak, thermal regulator and protector.
Main predators badgers, hawks kites, raiders.
Aris in the loo and hygiene. An important element in hygiene in the brood is detecting disease control, detecting dead or parasetising brood. Honey bees very clean. (protect against verora) Bees specialise in cell clearing, dead detected smell. signal response system. Death cues also in bumble bees and ants. Some species dying send out warning signals prior to death. Grave diggers are for life. We know little of wasps. Sibling canabalism sometimes. Some abandon whole infected nest and start again.
5. Aris continues. The honey bee famous waggle dance (1945 observed). When she finds a good place, she dances to indicate to the others where to go. Distance and direction. Is there a wasp waggle dance equivalent?
Ants bees and wasps – Lovak friend of Darwins wrote up his observations mainly about Ants. One chapter on wasp. Local enhancement cues (if market stall popular).
wasp answer gastric drumming. No waggle dance. But as gruesome as the waggle dance is elegant: giant Asian hornet: raid honey bee hives killing the worker bees and brood and carry them back to feed their own. To recruit mates smear secretions on to the bee hive to attract more into the slaughter. Rare example shift from isolated to social hunter.
6/32 Insect brains much simpler than other animals. Visual cognative processing in Bees. 2001 Bees can learn relational concepts, learning from one situation to another.
I am an in between generation, in between writing – Italic no less, hold the pen lightly never too tightly – and computers, a technology I actively embraced. I am inspired to make notes on this book. Recommended to me by Bernice, I began it in April and at last find time to embrace it again
Kalikellett 