It’s springtime! I’m always amazed at how quickly everything greens up and how the days suddenly seem to go on forever…at our house, spring is a welcome time of year. Spring also means warmer temperatures, flowering plants, and pollen – all welcome conditions for a wide variety of bees and wasps.
Several unrelated ground-nesting bees make their presence known in yards this time of year. Usually the first sign of these harbingers of spring are piles of soil surrounding small holes in the ground. While many of these bees can sting, they are solitary in nature (though several may be drawn to an area by favorable conditions) and are not aggressive. They are, in fact, quite beneficial overall, being pollinators of crops and predators of pest insects. We encourage people to tolerate them due to their beneficial nature – and the fact that they are transient, and will be gone within a few weeks’ time.
Common paper wasps also become active this time of year. These insects spend the winter as adults in protected cavities, cracks, and crevices, and emerge as the weather warms. They can be seen in large numbers flying around eaves and gables, and on wood decks gathering wood that they mix with saliva to begin constructing nests. While they can be a nuisance, they are nearly impossible to control in the environment until they construct a nest that can be targeted.
Finally, in about 3 months cicada killer wasps will make their debut. These interesting creatures dig conspicuous burrows in favorable areas (well-drained, south-facing slopes) and provision them with paralyzed cicadas. Fearsome in appearance, they are actually quite docile, and the majority of individuals seen are males that cannot sting. Buzzing about and patrolling an area, they are more concerned with female cicada killers than with humans.
For more reading on these fascinating critters, I recommend the following links:
http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2143.html (great info on ground-nesting bees)
and
http://sites.lafayette.edu/hollidac/research/biology-of-cicada-killer-wasps/ (Chuck Holliday’s great webpage on cicada killers)
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next time!
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