Vespidae: Hornets and Allies - Family Spotlight

[00:00:00]Hornets and other social wasps have long been used in media as the foundations for some pretty terrifying foes. Swarms of Beedrill in Pokemon, tracker jackers in the Hunger Games, that one big wasp in Doctor Who. But do these wasps really deserve their reputation, or are they just a victim of bad press? Welcome to the Insect Spotlight Project, a channel dedicated to shining a light on insects, spiders, and any other creepy crawies that get left out of the ecologic spotlight. Today we are talking about the family Vespiday, the hornets, and allies. Vespiday is a family in the order himoptera, the ants, wasps, bees, and sawflies. So, if you want a broader look at all of himoptera, you can click that link above. Now, just a second ago, I called this family the Hornets and Allies. When there isn't a great common name to encompass a whole tax on, you can take one of the more notable members of the group and then add and allies at the end. However, the easier option in this case is just to call them Vespids.

[00:01:04]These Vespids can be found worldwide across all continents except Antarctica.

[00:01:08]And the family vesped contains over 5,000 different species. This family actually encompasses a lot of different wasps that you may recognize. Hornets and yellow jackets, paper wasps, potter wasps, hover wasps, pollen wasps, upupara, they're all vespeds. Given that these wasps are what many people picture when they hear the word wasp, it should come as no surprise that vesped literally means wasp family. Vespa means wasp in Latin. But despite this, there isn't one obvious shared characteristic you can use to immediately identify a vespit. However, we still can give some general traits to help narrow things down. I talk a lot about bees versus wasps in my apiday video. So, for now, let's just focus on how to differentiate vespids from other wasp families. One trait you can use to quickly narrow down your search is their notched eyes. If you look closely, you'll see that part of the vespit eye seems to be cut out by the antenna. Now, this can be subtle in some taxa, and other families can have notched eyes as well, like the scalia day, but it's a start. Another trait to look for is their very narrow wings.

[00:02:15]When at rest, vespids fold their wings hot dog style or lengthwise for you academics. This gives their wings a sharp and streamlined appearance. It's not foolproof, but it's another tool for the toolkit. Now, if you get really up close and personal with the yellow jacket nest in your backyard, you may also be able to doublech checkck the shape of their pronotum. The pronotum is directly behind the head at the very anterior edge of the thorax. And in Vespiday, the pronotum has a sort of U- shape when viewed from above and a triangular shape when viewed from the side as it stretches back toward the wings. All of these traits together can help you work toward a positive vespit ID. But of course, vespids aren't going to look the same across their entire life cycle. Like other himopterins, vespids are holo metabolists, meaning they have a complete four- stage metamorphosis going from egg to larvae to pupa to adult. Although all vespids are holo metabolists, the details of their development are incredibly diverse. One of the biggest differentiators being their levels of sociality. Many groups in the family vesped are you having an overlap of generations, cooperative brood care, and different reproductive casts. So think like queen versus worker. In these groups, you'll have multiple individuals working together as a single unit. As many of you may know all too well, hornets, yellow jackets, and paper wasps are all examples of use social vespits.

[00:03:40]For these social taxa, it's easier to go over what the life cycle of a colony looks like, as individual life cycle can look pretty different depending on sex and cast. Our story begins with a fertilized queen or foundress ready to build her army. For temperate species, these queens will normally mate before the winter hits, so that way come spring they already have everything they need to start laying eggs. After finding an adequate nesting site in a tree and a hole or on your back porch, the queen builds a small papery nest of woody fibers mixed with her spit, although some species will build with mud and such. After laying her first batch of eggs and rearing this initial brood to adulthood, these new workers can start to take over foraging and nest building so the queen can lock in on expanding their numbers. Vespit foraging holds a little bit more variety than your average honeybee. Instead of just hopping from flower to flower, they'll harvest live prey like caterpillars, chomp off chunks of meat from carcasses, and also enjoy sugary delights like rotting fruit, nectar, tree sap, or the soda from your Coke can. Hence why you see them around trash cans so much. It's like a smorgus board. Though it should be mentioned that adult vespids have a fully liquid diet and you see them carrying whole caterpillars or chunks of meat. That's for the kiddos back home.

[00:04:57]The adult workers will chew up the meaty provision and feed the larve the resulting goop to give them the protein power pack they need to complete their development. This isn't fully one-sided though, as the larve will exude an amino acidrich secretion for the adults to feed on. But once the larve are fat and happy, they'll go ahead and pupate. The pupy are pale and squishy looking and their exorate. So you'll notice their limbs are not fused to their body. After a week or two, they'll emerge as adults.

[00:05:24]And as the seasons pass and colonies grow, they'll begin to create males and reproductive females, new future queens.

[00:05:31]And these queens will fly off and mate, sometimes with one male, sometimes with multiple, and gather all the sperm they need for their future colonies. For tempered species, they'll then have to settle in and find tucked away spaces to overwinter as the cold creeps in and kills off the old colonies. But this is a generalized colony life cycle. Colony structure and behavior can look very different across species. ALA Vina, for example, creates massive multi-ween colonies numbering up to 1 million individuals. And on the flip side, you've got the hover wasps, whose colonies can be just a handful of individuals. Hover wasps are kind of weird all around though. They tow the line of you sociality. Some colonies do seem to be usocial with one female doing all the reproducing and then other times you've got a single wasp rearing young on its own or maybe with the help of one of its daughters for a brief period of time. This is facultative youociality as they don't have to be youocial. Obligate usociality is when a species is exclusively youocial like your average yellow jacket. But it isn't just colony size that varies. The wasps themselves can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. For example, the genus palibia has members only a few millimeters in length where Asian giant hornet is a few centimeters in length. Some usocial vespids have even branched off into social parasetism. The queens of these parasitic taxa will emerge and kill off the foundress of another species, usually before her initial workforce reaches maturity. The parasitic queen will then match the odor of the old queen. So when those new workers emerge, they will aid the parasitic queen in rearing her young. You can find examples of this in the paper wasps and the hornets. That socially parasitic hornet vespedoski actually usurps wellestablished colonies as opposed to new ones. So it just waltes into a different active hornet nest, kills the queen, and takes it over. Pretty insane.

[00:07:28]And this whole video we've only talked about the ecology of these social vespits. Most vespids are going to be solitary. One thing that the solitary vespids do share with the social ones is that they're great mothers. Although the larve don't have entire armies looking after them, solitary vespids will still construct little chambers for the larve and provision them with paralyzed insects or spiders. Absolutely horrifying for the prey but kind of sweet for an insect mother. Often times these chambers are constructed from mud.

[00:07:56]This is how potter wasps got their name as their brood chambers look like little clay pots. Not to be confused with mud dobbers which are in a separate family entirely. In the upupar DNA, however, these nests are constructed underground.

[00:08:09]They excavate out little tunnels with offshoots to put their eggs. We don't know a ton about this subf family's biology, but they do seem to fancy beetle larvi for provisioning their young. But not all vespid larve are carnivorous. The subf family msarin provisions their young with pollen and nectar rather than insects and spiders.

[00:08:28]And this bee-like behavior has earned them their common name pollen wasps.

[00:08:33]Interestingly enough, different species in this group seem to be specialized on specific groups of flowers. So does do a lot of things and as with many groups who do things, some of the things they do can interfere with the things we do.

[00:08:46]One conflict that can cause us some grief is the venomous needles attached to their abdomen. They're stingers. The first thing that many people think of when they see a vespid is their sting.

[00:08:56]And I'm not blaming anyone for that. If you see someone holding a knife, you're probably not focusing on the color of their shoes. And I'm not going to pretend that their venom is nothing to worry about. It is true that though painful, a single sting from a vespid isn't going to do too much damage unless you're allergic. But often times with the usocial vespids, there's more than just one. Like other used social insect colonies, vespid nests are energetically quite valuable with mass amounts of brood creating a potential feast for bears and other large predators. So they need ways to defend themselves. So workers come equipped with stingers. And these stingers aren't as heavily barbed as say the honeybees. So they can usually sting more than once. And as they attack intruders, they'll release alarm pherommones to rally more wasps to aid in the battle. I got a bit of firsthand experience with this while trying to photograph a small nest of European hornets. Uh, I thought I was being safe using my medium zoom lens, but apparently I got a little too close for comfort as through my camera, I saw all the wasp heads turn and look at me and then disappear. I bolted, but not before one nicked me on the leg. Could have been a lot worse, though. I didn't even get any pictures, which is like the worst part. I mean, this thing was annoying, but the fact I didn't even get a single pick for it, I mean, come on.

[00:10:11]I'm not mad at them, though. I still love vespits. They just had a lot of babies to protect. You social wasps are often aggressive for a reason, especially around their nest. Solitary wasps with less to lose are often quite docile. But just because I don't blame them does not mean I underestimate them.

[00:10:28]You still should not go stirring up hornet nests. On average, roughly 70 people a year are killed from wasp or bee stings in the US alone. And though most of these are allergic reactions, if you aren't allergic, you should still heed caution. In addition to their sting, vespits can cause apiaries some grief as well. Hornets specifically are well documented to prey on honeybees.

[00:10:49]You can sometimes find them bee hawking where they hover at the entrance to the hive and snatch honeybees on their way back from foraging. The honeybees are not helpless, though. One particularly notable defense they have is heatballing, where groups of worker bees will encase the hornet and buzz rapidly to increase temperature and CO2 concentration, eventually killing the invader. But despite the negative impact on honeybee colonies, vesped are extremely beneficial in agriculture. As we talked about earlier, most vespids rear their young on insect protein and many of these insects they're snatching are herbivorous. So having vespids about in your agricultural field can be free pest control from things like caterpillars and beetle larve. Also they do visit flowers and though not as famous a pollinator as bees, I can personally attest they do move pollen about as they move from bloom to bloom.

[00:11:39]So their pest control and pollination wrapped up in one neat little package.

[00:11:43]Vespids do get a bad rep, but they really are crucial components of our local ecosystems. So, if you see them out in the wild, maybe keep your distance, but no need to demonize them.

[00:11:53]They usually are only aggressive when defending their nest. Most of the time, they don't want anything to do with you.

[00:11:58]That being said, if you have a yellow jacket nest on your house or something, I will never try to guilt you for getting rid of it. You need to protect yourself and your kids and your pets if you have them. But if it's far enough out and it isn't bothering anybody, maybe let it do its thing. And as mentioned, solitary vespids are much more docile. So, if you're lucky enough to have some potter wasps or something hanging around, I recommend letting it be. And you might even be able to catch it bringing home a fresh caterpillar.

[00:12:24]And even if you don't want them nesting on your patio, you can still benefit local vespid populations by planting native flowering plants and conserving leaf litter so that way the foundresses have something to overwinter in. But anyway, thank you all for listening. If you like the content, please remember to like and subscribe to keep up to date with future videos. And if you have any favorite species of vespit or any fun facts I missed, please leave them in the comments below. I'd love to hear about it. Peace, y'all.