Waspy insect helped create quite a buzz
INSECT ID can be tricky but rewarding. I was at one of our closed nature reserves searching desperately for wildlife and could find nothing to photograph.
So I resorted to looking on plants for insects and found a quite striking example on a leaf just across the road from the reserve.
It looked like a wasp with a body that had been stretched. Its abdomen, the bit at the back, was black and yellow stripes with a tiny waist somehow joining it up to the black and yellow spotted thorax. It had yellow legs and antennae and a black head with a yellow spot on its face. It also had stickout wings, so it didn’t look like a common wasp.
Using Google I came to the conclusion that this was a European paper wasp and I should have fled as these “ground bees” can sting you.
I spent the next day happily finding facts to share with you, but I decided to check my findings with our resident bee/wasp/insect expert, Ben Hargreaves.
Ben said (kindly): “Hello Alan - certainly see where you are coming from with the suggestion of Polistes - paper wasps (which I’ve only seen in Spain) but I’m sure this is a sawfly - which is a bad name for an insect which is more related to a wasp than a fly. In terms of ID these are often very tricky but I am fairly sure this is a shot of Tenthredo scrophulariae, the figwort sawfly.”
Adults can grow up to 15mm long and have bright orange antennae, which I should have noticed, and there is an orange front to that wing.
They appear in any habitat where figwort grows. Figwort are great because they are engineered for pollinators with a nice little pod for the insect to visit.
Figwort sawflies do look like wasps except, in flight, they are slower and drag those long, orange legs behind them. They are described as being quite calm when they are resting. I certainly had quite a while to take pictures.
If I was an expert I would have spotted a rectangular head that is more like a fly than a wasp.
I was absolutely delighted, with Ben’s help, to finally identify my photographic model. And I thought about this when a news story arose recently.
The National Bee Unit, made up of top insect experts, were asked to identify an Asian hornet found in Bury in a cauliflower.
Beekeepers are concerned over the Asian hornet because it can attack and kill many bees in a colony. It is smaller than our own hornets and shouldn’t be confused with the Asian giant hornet that can kill people.
The Asian hornet was discovered in the UK in 2004 and experts have been trying to destroy nests ever since. It is not yet common in the North West.
Ben was a bit wary of the reports as there have been mistakes recently where Asian hornets have been wrongly identified when they were, in fact, European hornets.
However, it seems that the evidence was right and the Bury insect was an Asian hornet. Let’s hope our experts stop it before it damages local colonies.
To become a member of the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside go to the website at www.lancswt.org.uk or call 01772 324129. For more information about Cheshire Wildlife Trust call 01948 820728 or go to cheshirewildlifetrust.org.uk.