Latest Hymenoptera Stories
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A single ant colony can have thousands of ants, all scurrying around performing various tasks, maintaining their territory for the queen. And because they all look alike, studying them individually by eye can prove extremely difficult, if not impossible. To bypass this obstacle, Danielle Mersch and colleagues from the University of Lausanne tagged every single worker in entire ant colonies and tracked them by computer. The...
Scientists at The University of Manchester have found evidence of the genetic basis of the evolutionary arms-race between parasitoids and their aphid hosts. The researchers studied the reaction of aphids when a parasitic wasp with genetic variation laid eggs in them. They found that different genotypes of the wasp affected where the aphids went to die, including whether they left the plant host entirely. The team also found an example of the emergence of a shared phenotype that was partly...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online It’s commonly known that ants navigate by scent. As each ant randomly wanders in search for food or shelter, it leaves behind a trail of pheromones which other ants will then follow. The result is that famous line of ants leading to a family picnic or a particularly sticky spill. Though this behavior has been observed for centuries, it’s something which Simon Garnier from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and his...
Pensoft Publishers A mysterious parasitoid wasp was found in the Böhmerwald (Northeast Austria) and reared in the garden of the amateur entomologist Ewald Altenhofer of Gross Gerungs municipality, Austria. The parasitoid was identified by Kees van Achterberg, senior researcher at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, as the rare Seleucus cuneiformis. It is the first time that a tip of its biology was discovered. The study was published in the open access journal...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from Dr. Simon van Noort, from Natural History Department, Iziko South African Museum, and Dr. Matthew L. Buffington from the Systematic Entomology Lab, USDA describes nine new species of extremely rare Mayrellinid wasps. Mayrellinids are under-represented in museum collections with most species being known from only a single specimen. There are two genera in the Mayrellinae subfamily, Kiefferiella and Paramblynotus. Only...
FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology Scientists already knew that some social bee species warn their conspecifics when detecting the presence of a predator near their hive, which in turn causes an attack response to the possible predator. Researchers at the University of Tours (France) in collaboration with the Experimental Station of Arid Zones of Almeria (Spain) have now demonstrated that they also use chemical signals to mark those flowers where they have previously...
New research delivers a sting in the tail for queen wasps. Scientists have sequenced the active parts of the genome – or transcriptome – of primitively eusocial wasps to identify the part of the genome that makes you a queen or a worker. Their work, published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology, shows that workers have a more active transcriptome than queens. This suggests that in these simple societies, workers may be the 'jack-of-all-trades' in the colony -...
Emory University When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their environment, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps. The discovery by biologists at Emory University is being published in the journal Science on Friday, February 22. “The adult flies actually anticipate an infection risk to their children, and then they medicate them by depositing them in alcohol,” says Todd...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online How do you look for your perfect mate? Perhaps you take long walks on the beach, share a candlelight dinner, have a virtual date on Skype; or maybe it's smelling that scent of just the right perfume. When it comes to finding the perfect mate in the insect world, especially for a member of one particular wasp species, it only takes a whiff of the special love potion to know you have found "Mr. Right." Most insects rely on their...
Stanford University For the first time, scientists have measured how successfully a queen ant establishes new colonies. The work by Stanford researchers revealed that the queen was still reproducing several decades after mating. Ants are just about everywhere you look, and yet it's largely unknown how they manage to be so ubiquitous. Scientists have understood the carnal mechanism of ant reproduction, but until now have known little of how successful the daughters of a colony are when...
Latest Hymenoptera Reference Libraries
A wasp is any insect of the order Hymenoptera and suborder Apocrita that is not a bee, sawfly, or an ant. The less familiar suborder Symphyta includes the sawflies and wood wasps, which differ from the Apocrita by having a broad connection between the thorax and abdomen. Also, Symphyta larvae are mostly herbivorous and "caterpillarlike", whereas those of Apocrita are largely predatory or parasitic. Most familiar wasps belong to the Aculeata, a division of the Apocrita whose ovipositors are...
The Bombyliids are a large family of flies with hundreds of genera. Their life cycles are not well known. Adults generally feed on nectar and pollen, thus are pollinators of flowers. They superficially resemble bees, thus are commonly called bee flies, and this may offer the adults some protection from predators. The larval stage are predators or parasitoids of other insect eggs and larvae. The adult females usually deposit eggs in the vicinity of possible hosts, quite often in the burrows...
The bumblebee is a flying insect of the genus Bombus in the family Apidae and a relative of the common honeybee. The bumblebee feeds on nectar and gathers pollen to feed its young. They are beneficial to humans and the plant world alike, and tend to be larger than other members of the bee family. Most bumblebee species are gentle. From this comes their original name: "Humblebee". Bumblebees are social insects that are known for their black and yellow striped bodies, a commonality among the...
PHOTO CAPTION: Eriothrix rufomaculata (Photo taken by Keith Edkins) The tachinid flies (family Tachinidae) are by far the largest and most important group of insect parasitic flies, with over 1300 species in North America. It is a diverse group with some resembling drab houseflies and others brilliantly colored. All species are parasitic in the larval stage, and many are important natural enemies of major pests. Many species of tachinids have been introduced into North America from...
Yellowjackets are typically black-and-yellow wasps of the genus Vespula or Dolichovespula (though some can be black-and-white, the most notable of these being the bald-faced hornet, Dolichovespula maculata). They are characterized mostly by their distinctive combination of black-and-yellow color, small size (slightly larger than a bee), and entirely black antennae. They live in colonies and build globular paper nests. Workers are around 12-20 mm in length, depending on species, and feed on...
