The Urban Pantheist

Grass carrying wasp, Isondontia sp.

A few days ago Alexis called my attention to an insect carrying a long blade of grass through the air. It was a strange sight, since the insect was fairly small (about 15mm long) so it looked like a dry bit of grass was piloting itself upwards and away from us without help from the wind. Then I photographed this medium sized black wasp a couple days later, only to find that it was probably responsible for the flying grass trick.

Some wasps chew up wood and make paper nests of hexagonal cells, some take mud into their mouths and make clay pots or pipes, some lay their eggs in the tissue of living plants and let their grubs live in the weird galls that result. Grass-carrying wasps gather blades and stems of grass and stuff them into a cavity to make an unkempt analog to a typical songbird's nest. Into these nests they lay their eggs and provision them with paralyzed tree crickets. (The most well-known cricket is the snowy tree cricket, whose song can be used to tell the temperature).

Our July Urban Nature Walk took place in the small city of Quincy, where there was some known habitat of a particular very special species of wasp. My friend Jenn, an invasive species expert with the State Department of Agriculture led a small group of us behind a big indoor skating rink to a barely maintained little league field called Curry Field

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My feelings on spiderwort have evolved in the two years or so that I've been aware of it. First I dismissed it as a cultivated flower, then accepted it as a native (albeit a cultivar), and finally have come to meet it with a mixture of disdain and resignation. It has a pretty purple flower that attracts and benefits pollinating insects, and it blooms early in the season and early in the day, seeming to prefer lower light conditions. But it is thoroughly invasive, and since we've been paying attention to Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, black swallow-wort and celandine, the spiderwort has been spreading like wildfire.

In any case, my primary interest in a flower is to take note of what insects gather to it. Above a nymph of a short-horned grasshopper clings uncharacteristically to the blossom, rather than the succulent leaves.


Instead, a tiny bee-mimic hover fly rests on the leaf. You should be up there feeding on flower nectar! Whatever.


That's better! A pollinator actively pollinating. I'll let you know what this metallic green hymenopteran is once the experts tell me (unless you are an expert and want to tell me--that's good too). I suspect it's a solitary bee, but it might be a cuckoo wasp, or maybe something entirely different.

Gorytina wasp, Family Crabronidae, Subtribe Gorytina

Gory Tina? Surely someone has a friend named Tina who will be utterly thrilled to learn of this obscure taxon of wasp! Frankly, I don't even know if it's pronounced that way, but I can't say it any other way. Wouldn't it be great if the Gory Tina wasp had some awful life cycle that involved some helpless creature being consumed from the inside out?

Well of course it does, it's a wasp! Many if not most wasp species feed their young living and paralyzed prey. Each group of wasps specializes on a different group of prey animals--remember the great golden digger wasp uses only katydids, for example. The gorytina wasp is a much smaller insect, so it requires smaller provisions for its larva: treehoppers.

Thanks to Jenn Forman Orth for introducing me to a new virtual community of bug-identifiers, and to Doug Yanega, whose elegant ID read thus: "this is a Gorytine Crabronid. They eat treehoppers."

Yellow jackets have begun building their nests! This one built a nest inside the shed where I keep my insecticides (pause for laughter). It came down when I opened the shed door, and two yellow jackets came out: the one pictured, and a much smaller one. I caught this one with a glueboard in order to photograph the marks on the abdomen, which supposedly help identify the yellow jacket to species.

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This spray of Canada goldenrod Solidago canadensis is part of a big stand of it way in the back part of the yard, and was alive with honeybees Apis mellifera when I took this shot.

Canada goldenrod is the most common and most weedy of the many kinds of goldenrod that occur in our area. It's a classic weed, appearing after a place has been disturbed--by fire, flood, bulldozer etc.--and enjoying the full sun and bare soil. It survives out in the open until the open space becomes enclosed by the shade of shrubs and trees. It may help to delay this succession by putting chemicals in the soil that impede the growth of maples and other plants. Each goldenrod plant has hundreds of flowers attracting insect pollinators as varied as flies, beetles, bees, wasps, butterflies, and moths. The seeds are fed upon by goldfinches and other birds. Goldenrod suffers from the misconception that it is a major cause of allergies--probably a confusion resulting from other, less conspicuous plants that bloom at the same time, such as ragweed.

Honeybees are semi-domestic animals, probably native to India or the Mediterranean, brought to virtually everywhere on Earth by humans. Our species provides artificial nesting places and locates them near crops that need pollinating. These bees are generalists, able to feed on and pollinate thousands of species of plants, most of which are completely alien to them. There are mobile honeybee colonies, dozens of hives put on trucks which drive through the night to service various agricultural fields. In recent years these hives have suffered mysterious losses, likely a combination of various stresses and the effects of pesticides.

I've found that one common perception that has developed from the science journalism about this issue is that "the bees" are disappearing. Why, then, are we being stung by yellowjackets, etc.? It's an educational opportunity.


This is a bee-mimicking fly (anyone know what kind?) on another goldenrod blossom nearby.

Canada goldenrod appeared earlier as 365 urban species #223. In the same entry I wrote about ragweed.

The honeybee was 365 Urban species #194.

Yellow jackets scavenging a white-footed mouse carcass.

Alexis took a much better version.

A small bee on a blossom of sulfur cinquefoil Potentilla recta


Huge hideous hand added for scale.