The more you examine the complex world of the Hymenoptera, the more you read what man has come to know about them, you will be astounded at the goings on in just this section of the insect kingdom and will wonder what else we have yet to discover. Whole books, or indeed libraries, could be written on the lives of the social species of bees, wasps and ants. These insects live a feudal life, with a queen at the head of the colony (sometimes more than one), males and workers, each one with a designated duty dedicated to serving the community. Bees cannot survive at less than about 8?C (well above freezing point) yet in the coldest winters they find a means of maintaining a temperature of 20-30?C in the Centre of a hibernating cluster and at least 8 Degree C nearer the outside. Workers returning home from scouting for food perform a dance which indicates to the rest of the pollen gatherers the precise direction and distance of the food source, even if there is not a direct flight path which might be obstructed by a building or even a mountain.
Life in these nests is highly organized and efficient. There may be tens of thousands of individual eggs and larvae in a bees’ nest, yet each one gets perfect individual attention and food when required, not just daily, but more frequently than this. The same goes for the other social species. There are scores of species of solitary bees and wasps as well, many of which are quite unknown to the layman. Each one has its own story that is quite absorbing when you begin to look at its way of life. The Potter Wasp builds a neat little vessel of clay, then goes out and collects a caterpillar larger than herself, paralyses it with a sting and puts it into the vessel with an egg laid on the caterpillar. The larva hatches and has an everlasting deepfreeze of food at its disposal for its entire life. Leaf Cutting Bees cut neat oblong pieces out of rose leaves and perfectly circular pieces to form the ends of a cigar-shaped cell which is built in out-of-the-way cavities where the brood can be raised in safety. There are Carpenter Bees, Spider Wasps which, in South America, can outwit even the giant Bird Eating Spider, paralyse it and cart it back to its solitary cell like the Potter Wasp, and Mining Bees which form little warrens, diligently scooping and sweeping away their excavations.
Hymenoptera are notorious parasites. There are hundreds of species of quite large, slender-bodied wasps which lay an egg or a batch of eggs in the body of a caterpillar. The grub quickly hatches and lives under the caterpillar’s skin consuming its flesh but carefully avoiding the vital organs until much later when it has grown so big that it takes up the entire skin of the caterpillar. The grub then pupates and finally emerges as a grotesque wasp.
Other kinds produce hundreds of tiny wasps instead of one large one and there is even a family of Chalcid Wasps which are so small as to be able to produce 70 little wasps from a single butterfly’s egg-an egg that is smaller than a pin head. Many of these parasitic wasps are incredibly beautiful both in their elegant shapes and their brilliant iridescent colours. Parasitic ants also exist and there is one which deliberately cuddles the worker of another species of ant so as to absorb its smell and thus enable it to arrive undetected in the main colony, penetrate the inner sanctum of the queen’s chamber, and then murder the queen by strangulation. And this is not simply a villain, an individual gone wrong, it is the way of life for that species. Even the friendly old Bumble Bee pillages other Bumble Bees’ nests, though in the case of one species it has the respect not to harm the queen herself even though the rest of the colony and the nest are totally destroyed.
Sawflies and the related wood wasps do not have the characteristic wasp waist and are a suborder of the Hymenoptera. They have specially adapted cutting or boring sting-like tails with which to deposit their eggs in slits made in wood, leaves or stems. Sawfly larvae very much resemble moth larvae but they are recognizable by the greater number of legs and usually by the way they curl up the tail end. Gall wasps cause curiously shaped and often attractive growths on plants. Oak Apples are examples. A gall may contain a number of hyper parasites and lodgers. One gall was found to contain no less than seventy-five different insect species all sharing the one home.
Termites, often called White Ants, and living in colonies like ants, are in fact not Hymenoptera but an order on their own (Isoptera). The young are miniatures of the adult and there is no pupil stage. Curiously enough they are more closely related to the cockroaches but their social life leads one to think of them as one of the ants.
