#75 Bees, Ants and Wasps

Eric Grissell, 254 pages.

My latest reading of the amazing order Hymenoptera.  This book had a broader scope of the order which showed the life cycles of predatory wasps, which is something I really haven't read much about before.  One of the more disgusting things wasps do is lay eggs on living caterpillars, then egg hatches into a larva which enters the caterpillar and proceeds to eat the caterpillar from the inside while the caterpillar is alive and eating as normal.  Eventually the caterpillar dies because too many vital organs had been eating and the larva pupates and sometimes overwinters in the carcass and emerges in the spring as an adult.  This is just one of the ways wasps reproduce.  Another is they dig a hole in the ground and then fill it with dead spiders or butterflies and then lays an egg on top, and then close the hole.  The larva hatches and eats its way through the proffered food and then pupates.  The life of a wasp is shockingly cruel, and makes me recollect the classic film Alien.  There were other good stuff in this book which is really an argument for sparing wasps ants and bees as being essential to a healthy garden.  After all caterpillars, though they metamorphose into beautiful butterflies, damage many plants and even kill some plants during their voracious feeding frenzy, and wasps are an excellent pest control for these beautiful ravagers.