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A black garden ant (Lasius niger) engaging in necrophoresis. Necrophoresis is a sanitation behavior found in social insects – such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites – in which they carry away the dead bodies of members of their colony from the nest or hive area.
The larva feeds on the host's tissues until ready to pupate; by then the host is generally either dead or almost so. A meconium, or the accumulated wastes from the larva is cast out as the larva transitions to a prepupa. [12] [13] Depending on its species, the parasitoid then may eat its way out of the host or remain in the more or less empty ...
Female fig wasps can reach the ovaries of short female flowers with their ovipositors, but not long female flowers. Thus, the short female flowers grow wasps, and the long flowers only seeds. Contrary to popular belief, ripe figs are not full of dead wasps and the "crunchy bits" in the fruit are only seeds.
Some social wasps are omnivorous, feeding on fallen fruit, nectar, and carrion such as dead insects. Adult male wasps sometimes visit flowers to obtain nectar . Some wasps, such as Polistes fuscatus , commonly return to locations where they previously found prey to forage. [ 37 ]
You’ve probably heard rumors about figs being filled with small wasps. Without the tiny bugs, the Ficus species, the producer of figs, would go extinct.
Face of a southern yellowjacket (Vespula squamosa)Yellowjackets may be confused with other wasps, such as hornets and paper wasps such as Polistes dominula.A typical yellowjacket worker is about 12 mm (0.47 in) long, with alternating bands on the abdomen; the queen is larger, about 19 mm (0.75 in) long (the different patterns on their abdomens help separate various species).
Approximately 300 species of Polistes paper wasps have been identified worldwide. The most common paper wasp in Europe is Polistes dominula. [2] The Old World tribe Ropalidiini contains another 300 species, and the Neotropical tribes Epiponini and Mischocyttarini each contain over 250 more, so the total number of true paper wasps worldwide is about 1100 species, almost half of which can be ...
Spider wasps are best distinguished from other vespoid wasps in having (in most species) a transverse groove bisecting the mesopleuron (the mesepisternal sclerite, a region on the side of middle segment of the thorax above the point where the legs join). They have antennae with 10 flagellomeres in females and 11 in males.