The Urban Pantheist

I stood with another naturalist (actually a bona fide scientist who I admire and feel honored to hang out with sometimes) waiting for a third to arrive, when we noticed this wasp. Neither of us felt threatened, as she was extremely busy digging about in the sand. The sand was left over from the winter road treatment, and so was shallow and not very hard packed--not great for the wasp's purposes. She dug in one area and then another, occasionally picking up a pebble larger than her head with her mandibles and placing it away from her work zone. She was trying to find a place to dig a burrow in which to lay her eggs. Once she found one (she'll have better luck over at the baseball infields across the street) she'd then go find caterpillars and sawfly larvae (which humans often mistake for caterpillars, so I guess, close enough?) sting them to paralyze them, and stuff them down the hole with her eggs.

This genus of moth is Ammophila which means "sand-lover," and the silvery dashes on the thorax indicate that this is probably A. procera.

The St Louis Zoo's insectarium was very impressive. Check out this climbing structure for the leafcutter ants!


Plants were provided for the ants to cut up and bring to their fungus farm.

( for the unsqueamish )

I stopped along the expanse of goldenrod to look at a small wasp. In the field, I was sure I would not be able to identify it without a lot of help. Once I blew up the picture and looked at it, I recognized an old friend--smaller perhaps than I remembered her, but unmistakeable in her red outfit with yellow stripes. This is a native paper wasp--I'm so used to seeing the invasive European variety that I'd forgotten what to look for.

Two experts that I've consulted disagree, albeit slightly, on what species we're looking at here. One says that it's the species that was more common before the European displaced it, the northern paper wasp Polistes fuscatus.* Another somewhat more intriguing theory, is that it's P dorsalis** one of the smaller species in the group, more common in the Southeast but known to occur in Massachusetts. Either way it's a native social wasp, peacefully drinking nectar and pollinating native goldenrod.

* "Smoky-colored founder of the city"

** Dorsalis refers to the back of the body. Dunno.

When people tell me they have ants indoors, I ask how big. If they say small, they're probably pavement ants or odorous house ants that are nesting in the cement of the floor or foundation. If they say big, well, then I know the building is in need of repair. Often I'll ask if the ceiling leaked last time it rained--usually it did. These eastern black carpenter ants Camponotus pennsylvanicus* only move in if there's some nice water-damaged wood for them to nest in.

The main nest is in the dead part of a live tree. The ants travel across the branches at night, into the upper levels of wood construction of a building. If there's water damaged wood they can work with their mandibles, they'll bring over several dozen of their larvae. They bring the larvae not just to have a ready-made supply of new workers, but to help them eat. Adult ants can't eat solid food, so they bring bits of insects to the larvae, who chew them up and regurgitate liquid the adults can lap up. Besides dead insects, carpenter ants like sugar-rich foods, like aphid honeydew and discarded and carelessly stored human food.

Carpenter ants are a critical part of the forest ecosystem. They move into trees that have been weakened by fungi to build their nests. Large woodpeckers come to feed on the colony, opening up cavities in the dead wood. Cavity nesting birds depend on these sites to reproduce. Wood ducks, for example, are unable to make their own cavities in which to nest, and thus depend on woodpeckers, carpenter ants, and wood decaying fungi in order to successfully reproduce.

* Camponotus means "flat back", referring to the flattened or weakly curved dorsal mesosomal profile of most Northern Hemisphere species.

Face down, abdomen up, that's the way she likes to dig a burrow for her eggs. Then this golden digger wasp Sphex ichneumonius* will hunt for an animal in the Tettigoniidae** family--a katydid, in other words--sting it to paralyze it, drag it into the burrow and lay an egg on it. The wasp grub then enjoys fresh insect flesh as it grows. In this case, however, the wasp was digging in sand that was about 2 inches deep over asphalt. Hopefully she found a more appropriate place to raise her young.



* "Mongoose wasp"

** from Greek τεττιξ (τεττιγ-) 'cicada'

A light fixture is no place to establish a colony. I mean, it has its virtues--it's under the eave protected from the rain, for example. But whatever benefits this location provides are vastly outweighed by being an inconvenience to the humans within the building.


It's a shame because the architects of this young nest were bald-faced hornets Dolichovesula maculata*, who voraciously hunt other insects to feed to their young--I have read that they even catch their closest relatives, the much hated yellow jackets. Adults feed on liquid sugar, either flower nectar or the juice of discarded fruit. Workers defend the nest bravely and energetically. One memorable time I was attacking a mature nest and the workers kept bouncing off my bee veil, directly in front of my eyes. More often then not these social wasps build their nests high in the leafy canopy of trees, and we don't even know they were there until the autumn reveals the empty nest.

* "Spotted, long little wasp"

This little miner bee, Andrena sp.*, was sunning herself on a leaf along the path. Miner bees are solitary (non-social, non-colonial) creatures that dig tunnels in places where plant life is least dense; pathways, playing fields, and other human-created habitats may be the most suitable in their range. Many unrelated females often dig burrows in the same area, each female depositing an egg, and a bolus of pollen for the hatchling to feed on. I'm fairly certain this was the type of bee I picked off a flower to show a class last year, earning a tiny sting on my finger.

* according to Bugguide, "From Greek anthrene (ανθρηνη) 'hornet/wasp'; related Greek words originally referred to any buzzing insect."

Kikipuff and I were eating lunch outside at a picnic table when she began to be vexed by a single persistent yellow jacket worker. The wasp was intent on sampling my friend's chicken sandwich. Kiki ripped a chunk off of a chicken nugget and set it aside as an offering. The wasp's behavior didn't change. I realized that while the insect had originally oriented by scent, now she remembered the location of the food source and was not to be dissuaded. We slid down the bench and Kiki left the chunk of chicken at her now vacant spot on the table. Immediately the yellow jacket landed at the meat and took her time cutting a piece, before flying off to bring it to the larvae back in the nest.

I'm trying to photograph every wasp nest I encounter at work this summer. These are European paper wasps, not usually very aggressive. In this case they had built a nest in the open end of a chain link fence pipe, very close to an animal exhibit. Several people were stung probably after resting their hands on the pipe without looking.

European paper wasp nest, Franklin Park. These wasps can usually be tolerated, since they feed exclusively on other insects (and not on trash, like yellow jackets do). Unfortunately they often build their nests on man-made structures—I removed this one from a storage shed.