Debby Luquette
Adams County Master Gardener
(8/24) Have you ever watched a bumble bee fly? They don't have anything resembling a sleek, aerodynamic design, yet they move from flower to flower, one flower bed to the next, with grace. And that distinctive striping of yellow and brown hair, as well as hairs on her legs? Is it covered in pollen? Bees, wasps and hornets all belong to the order
called Hymenoptera, which includes many beautiful, and from the human perspective, downright useful members.
Don't confuse yellow jackets and hornets with bees and the more friendly wasps. Hornets and yellow jackets will defend a nest with ferocity and they can sting multiple times when threatened. But most wasps do not live in colonies and are relatively docile; they are solitary nest builders, digging holes in the ground in which they'll lay eggs.
Adults consume pollen or nectar, but they collect insects, usually insect pests from the garden, for their young. A female Blue-Winged Wasps, for instance, finds and digs up Japanese beetle grubs and paralyzes them with a sting. She then digs a whole nearby, lays an egg in the hole and puts the incapacitated larva in the hole with the egg. When the young larva hatches, it
has breakfast, lunch and dinner right there. After spending time eating the store its mother left behind, it will settle back to pupate and emerge the following year as an adult.
Some wasps are called parasitoids; they are usually the small ones, laying their eggs in or on another insect. Perhaps you've seen an the unfortunate tomato hornworm with the white sacs on its back. Those are pupating brachonid wasps, which hatch to continue the cycle of natural pest control in your garden. Aphid mummies, the hollowed shell of an
aphid, result when a parasitoid wasp lays its egg in the aphid and the new wasp emerges as an adult. The adults of both of these wasp species feed on dill, parsley, white clover and other tiny-flowered plants.
As important as these predatory wasps are, they are not considered as crucial to function of ecosystem functioning as the bees. Wasps are mostly predaceous and only depend on pollen or nectar as adults. Bees are pollen and nectar feeders in all their life stages, making them important in our human managed ecosystems. We often don't put a price tag
on ecosystem services, the work that nature does to keep the planet and its inhabitants - including us- functioning. If we consider orchards, farms and gardens, about three-quarters of our food depend on pollination by bees, a service valued at $20+ billion.
Honey bees are the 'rock stars,' given most of the credit, but the warm up act in Pennsylvania is really the native bees. Orchards depend on the early bees, like the blue orchard mason bees, which are out early in the flowering season and in the morning, working in the cool temperatures to stock their solitary ground nest tunnels with pollen.
Bumble bees are social bees; their colonies depend on queens which overwinter and lay a few eggs early on to start their small colonies. The queen tends the first brood with pollen and a little honey until the larvae become the new workers. The colony increases in size and activity until it reaches 100 or more individuals, and the workers are out
pollinating plants for us while they collect food for their brood.
There are several other bee species we can see in our gardens, and most of them are solitary nesters, unlike the social honey and bumble bees. Many of them are small and can be black, brown or metallic green. They are not all hairy, but the females hairs on their legs or lower abdomen to carry pollen. Some carry pockets of pollen on their legs.
