> Solitary bees and wasps
Makes me imagine middle-aged mail bees in their insect hotel late at night, watching too much bee porn and drinking too much naturally fermented blackberry wine, wondering where their lives have gone
Makes me imagine middle-aged mail bees in their insect hotel late at night, watching too much bee porn and drinking too much naturally fermented blackberry wine, wondering where their lives have gone
One of them had a bit too much last year and ended up sleeping it off on my porch window! It was interesting to watch her sleep - you wouldn't think it off the top of your head, but you can tell what stage of sleep they're in by their breathing, just as with sleeping humans. https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg
It makes me feel bad for killing a bunch of wasps one day, when I was having some coffee with cake at a coffeehouse with an open window, and a bunch of yellowjackets got attracted to the sugary things I was having.
Two things of note: I didn't know back then the yellowjacket's sting is one of the most painful, but also, it's very easy to kill wasps without getting stung, especially if they are interested in something else: just don't attack many of them at the same time, strike them with your hand against something hard, and make sure every kill counts so you don't get an angry wasp afterwards. I wasn't stung.
I feel bad about it though. They just wanted some cake, and who would blame them? I guess I was in a bad mood. I wish I had found a nonviolent way of dealing with those yellowjackets :/
I took this shot with my big birding lens, six feet or so from this nest that was under the eave of my side porch. It would have been both rude and dangerous to approach with my macro rig - she's guarding the nest and checking me out, too! Any nest will be actively patrolled against intruders large and small, but the intensity of concern scales roughly with the size of brood and colony, and this was a young nest with probably only one comb - I didn't know it was there until after I'd been much closer to it than this, but they weren't bothered at all, despite that I earned their attention again when I started taking an interest. Not long after this shot, the local raccoons found the same nest and left nothing of it but a few scraps of carton, but it was early enough in the season that they could have escaped and rebuilt elsewhere without losing too much brood - it's not all that easy for a human to tell, but from their looks I'm pretty sure this was the same family that came back later in the year for the figs. I hope so! There were lots of foragers in that tree, so if they were from the same colony then they not only survived but thrived.
I didn't even know solitary bees species existed. Live and learn.