Insect Hunting

I spent part of today hovering around late summer flowers, looking for the last of summer's insects. 

I saw the lovely bumblebees pictured above. Click to enlarge. 

And a cool scape moth. 

And hoverflies in lots of colors and styles. This one was gleaming in the sun.  

There were a lot of milkweed bug nymphs out today, and a dozen more things that flitted by before I had a chance to photograph them. 

I was walking to another spot when something on the side of a rock landscape  feature caught my eye -- inside that red circle. 

It was this! It's a European paper wasp's nest with two male Polistes dominula wasps on duty.  (At least there were two outside, but I think others were watching from the shadows.) 

Curled orange antennae...  

I flipped this shot. They look like they are coming for me, right? 

Look at that face! 

And I noticed I was not alone. I saw two praying mantises searching the bushes right along with me. This is mantis number one -- waiting to catch an insect to eat. 

And here's mantis number two holding something it caught. It left off eating when I walked over to snap the picture, then it went back to  eating as I backed away. So -- the bushes are still full of insects. Summer is not quite over. 

European Visitors

New York City has seen record-breaking heat this week, but the crowds of summer tourists seem undaunted. Despite the 98-feels-like-102 degree temperature, there were European visitors on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade on Saturday morning -- both human and insect kind. One of them was Polistes dominula, the invasive European Paper Wasp.

The European Paper Wasp, Polistes dominula. 

This pretty black and yellow wasp with brown cellophane-like wings was first noticed around Boston about thirty years ago. It has since spread throughout the northeast and was recently seen in California. It likes urban settings, including New York City.

It seems to be shouldering out our native Northern Paper Wasp, Polistes fuscatus. And it preys on caterpillars, which is bad news for urban butterflies. As if that were not bad enough, it builds papery nests in crevices and hollows around human dwellings, like in unused pipes or inside birdhouses or porch lights; it's possible to intrude on a nest without noticing and get stung.

So the European Paper Wasp is an unfortunate import. I felt nevertheless sympathetic as the temperature pushed upward and I stood in the heat watching a wasp pause to drink from a small pool of water caught on a leaf.

Fennel time!

Fennel, Foeniculum vulgare 

A handful of crushed fennel leaves smells deliciously of celery and licorice. 

There is a little patch of fennel among the flowers growing on the extension of Middagh Street that passes over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway near my home. The plant is tall with pretty feather-like foliage. Its tiny yellow flowers are borne in little bouquets that are technically called compound umbels, like the flowers of parsley and carrots.  Fennel is one of the main flavors in the cordial Absinthe, and it is used in herbal medicine too. The seeds are used as a spice, and some of us eat fennel bulbs and leaves as a vegetable. 

But we are not the only ones who like fennel. Wasps love it! 

On a sunny day a seemingly endless parade of exotic looking insects visits fennel blossoms, each more elegant that the last: thread-waisted wasps, potter wasps, mud dauber wasps, a good compliment of honeybees and bumble bees, and lots of fancy flies come in for a tasty sip of fennel nectar. 

Here are photos of a few recent visitors.

Isodontia elegans -- a "grass-carrying" wasp. 

They got the common name "grass-carrying" because they incorporate grass into their nests. 

Another Isodontia species. 

Polistes dominula -- the reviled European Paper Wasp. 

The European paper wasp is a relative new comer to the United States, introduced from Europe and first recorded in the northeastern United States in the 1980s. It has already gained a bad reputation as a cranky wasp that becomes aggressive toward humans with very little provocation. 

Sceliphron ceamentarium -- a black and yellow mud dauber wasp. 

Eumenes fraternus -- a potter wasp.

Visit this link to see how the potter wasp uses that fancy tail end to build a pot-shaped nest out of mud: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYMN_FXoXFk

There is more information about urban insects in my book,  Field Guide to Urban Wildlife, which will be published by Stackpole Books in spring 2011.