M ost species of wasp do not make honey. The exception is the Mexican honey wasp Brachygastra mellifica , although this wasp will only produce honey in small quantities and not on the scale of the honeybee Apis mellifera. Wasps simply consume it on the go to give themselves energy. Perhaps this is yet another reason that the wasp gets such a hard time. Bees on the other hand, were found to be highly appreciated.
This is unfortunate as wasps play a really important role in the ecosystem. That combination of nuisance and pain makes wasps many people's least favourite animals.
Perhaps more than any other insect, wasps are badly in need of a change in public opinion. As well as having fascinating lives, they are extremely important in the environment and face problems similar to those of their cherished, but often no less annoying, cousins the bees. As the summer approaches its end, many will wish for it, but a world without wasps would most certainly not be a better place. The insects we most commonly identify as "wasps" are the social wasps. Social wasps called yellow-jackets in some places live in colonies consisting of hundreds or thousands of more-or-less sterile female workers and their much larger mother, the egg-laying queen.
The handful of colony-living, nest-building species is just a tiny fraction of overall wasp diversity, estimated at more than 9, species in the UK alone. Most wasps are solitary, some are tiny a few species practically microscopic , none ever bother us and virtually all are overlooked. The nests start to develop in late spring, when queen wasps emerge from hibernation. Building a small nest of just a few paper cells, the queen must rear the first set of workers alone before the first batch of worker wasps can start to take over the work required by the developing colony.
Wasp workers toil ceaselessly to raise their sister workers from eggs the queen lays, cooperating and communicating in intricate ways to build and defend the nest, collect food and look after the queen. When the colony is large enough the workers start to give some young larvae more food at a much greater rate than usual, triggering genetic switches that cause the development of a potential queen rather than a worker.
The parasitic types of wasps use the same method to mark the hosts other insect species in which they have laid their eggs so other wasps would know. Set the Alarm By releasing special pheromone wasps warn each other of danger coming closer. They are incredibly protective of their nest and do not wait for you to start meddling with their nest before they attack. As soon as a wasp senses a large predator nearby it alarms the others of danger.
Unlike bees, wasps can sting you many times. After stinging, the wasps marks its victim with pheromone and the entire nest population can swarm against it to defend the nest.
Searching for Mates The entire ritual of attracting mates is initiated by the male and he releases the pheromones telling female wasps about his location, himself and his virility. The different female wasps are attracted to different pheromone chemicals and the one wasp that likes what the male emits will seek him out to mate.
Most wasp colonies do not survive because in the winter there is no food for them. No flower juices, no pollen, no other insects to feed on. There is only one individual that can survive through hibernating and that's the queen of the nest.
And even then not all queens can survive the harsh conditions. Queens hibernate in sheltered places and a variety of crevices, but spiders use the same hiding places in the winter and if they find a dormant queen - they kill it. Out of queens born in one year, at the end of the winter about two of them survive. Sounds weird? It's not. Wasps feed on small insects and parasites and kill a large number of different species in order to feed themselves and their young larvae.
Wasps play an important role in controlling the insect population on the planet. Without wasps , the world would be swamped by insects in disastrous proportions. This would also cause less biodiversity in the world of insects.
Currently, there is an abundance of insect species roaming the planet. So having wasps near your home is not as bad as it may seem. Thanks to the wasps you may be saved by other bigger and scarier problem with insects.
Some wasps are parasitic and tend to use living hosts to lay their eggs in. Most often it is caterpillars or spiders, and when the eggs hatch into larvae, the larvae start feeding on the host from the inside out. They may not be doing it on purpose or have it as a life goal to pollinate flowers and other plants, but they do. Just like any insect that feeds on flower nectar and juices, wasps too, transfer some of the pollen from one plant to another, thus pollinating them.
We need as many pollinators as we can get. Wasps are also helping fruits and vegetables. Wasps get inside of your home or office through open windows, open doors, cracks in the roof, sometimes you can bring them inside yourself with the washed clothes if you hang the clothes outside, or if a wasp has landed on you while you were going back inside. There are many ways it can get inside the house. The problem gets serious when wasps start building nests on your property.
The amount of fur is the most important factor for how much pollen a bee can carry. Wasps have to rely on carrying pollen using the receptacles on their legs. You get the idea. Wasps love and will go for anything sweet, and who can blame them? There are a few things that wasps absolutely love to go for:.
Soda or pop, whatever you call it, is PURE sugar. For instance, a trendy name brand of lemon-lime soda has roughly 33 grams of sugar per 12 ounces can, leading this to be highly desirable for both wasps and bees. It was a hot summer day with the sun beating down on us. Luckily, we had a cooler packed with stuff to keep us cool. I opened up a can of soda from that cooler, and immediately after I opened it, I had what I now know to be a yellowjacket come right up to the can and start to try and land on the lid.
Oh, and apparently, after I pointed out there was a wasp trying to drink my soda, we discovered that there was a multi-layer wasp nest less than 20 feet away under her deck.
This is essentially the same concept as the soda. If the drink has sugar in it, then both bees and wasps will come after it because of its resemblance to nectar. Like soda and juice alike, if you end up spilling these on your car during the summer, you will more than likely attract some wasps next to your parked car. If you have bees around your car, your first step is to clean it up.
My friend had a problem during the summer with bees turned out to be yellowjackets swarming her car while it was parked in her driveway. I ended up learning an enormous amount during that situation. Mainly, if there is spilled juice anywhere, both wasps and bees will most definitely be in search of it. The spilled liquid is some of the most accessible food they can get. Anything with simple sugar and wasps will swarm and view it as an easy meal.
When fruits like apples, oranges, bananas, and berries start to decompose, their scent becomes much more noticeable to insects. When the sugar in these fruits start to break down, wasps take notice and sense it as an easy meal. Usually, we eat fruit and then discard it in our gardens, in the woods, or far off in the lawn because it decomposes into the soil and replenishes it.
When we discard the scraps just out in the open, the fruit scraps will certainly attract bees, wasps, and other insects due to decomposition. Garbage rots and the complex sugars and proteins breakdown into more simple substances that are more desirable to bees and wasps.
0コメント