Tarantula Hawks: Gentle Giants of the Wasp World

You have probably encountered tarantula hawks on click-bait websites in a list of "most painful stings", "most bad-ass", or "biggest jerks of the animal world".  It's just fake news and sensationalism, except for the part about the painful sting. That's true.

Unless you annoy tarantula hawks sufficiently by grabbing them for research purposes or just because you are stupid, they ignore you and go about their business of feeding on nectar, and hunting spiders for wasp babies to eat. They don't just hunt tarantulas, any large spider will do.  I have had them run over my bare feet (it tickles) while they were searching my patio for black widows.

There were a dozen or more feeding on the flowers of a Vitex bush in my front yard so I grabbed the camera. These pictures were taken with a macro lens, my camera only a few inches from the wasp.  A couple of them bumped into me or the camera as they flew from flower to flower but I was just an inedible obstacle.

Female Pepsis grossa

The males find a good nectar source like the Vitex and hang out there in early June, waiting for females to show up. They might get lucky. 

Male

This species (Pepsis grossa) is amazing iridescent teal with rusty amber wings in New Mexico.  The Arizona variant is all black-teal iridescent, including the wings. The females have curled antennae, the antennae of the males are straight.

About that Sting

I have been stung once by a tarantula hawk, and yes it is intensely painful. It was a "could not move or talk" level of pain for the worst 5 minutes of my life, including the time I got a 600V jolt from a Nixie tube driver.  However painful, the sting didn't leave much of a trace once it was over. Compared to the hours of slightly less pain from a bark scorpion sting ... I'd take the wasp.

By briefly paralysing an attacker with pain, the wasp can often escape.  It's effective enough that very few insectivores are going to try to eat more than one.

See Also:

https://askentomologists.com/2015/09/27/please-stop-sharing-the-wasps-are-jerks-memes/   Read more!

Storm Damage, Mostly Hail

Along with three inches of rain in two weeks we had a few short hail showers.  The rain was welcome. The hail was not excessive, but the damage it caused might make a novice gardener think they had a mysterious disease or leaf-eating pests.

Here's the first example, a chile pepper with the typical irregular holes punched by hailstones.

Holes from Hailstones

And the second, which looks like some sort of a disease, but is just spots of freeze damage where a small hailstone landed on the tender tomatillo leaves, stayed there, and melted.

Freeze Damage from Hailstones

Read more!

Establishing Squash Bees in Your Garden

By the time honeybees get their lazy striped butts out of the hive and start their daily commute to my garden, squash bees have been at work for a couple of hours pollinating my squash.  There is so little pollen left that the honey bees seldom bother to visit the blossoms.

Squash Bee with pollen-covered legs

Squash Bee with distinctive narrow-striped abdomen

How do they do it?  Squash bees live where they work, and turn the blooms into a singles bar. The male bees hang around in the blossoms, waiting for unfertilized females to show up.  Towards noon the males and any unfertilized females enter a male blossom and let it close around them.  At dawn, when the next blossoms are opening, the bees chew through the walls of their overnight hostel and continue their search for a mate.

Withered male flowers are overnight refuges

Instead of a long commute back to a hive with the pollen, a fertilized female squash bee digs a nest close to the squash plants.  She stuffs one of the chambers with pollen, lays one egg on the pollen and seals that chamber.

Squash Bee with pollen-covered legs

The fertilized females spend the afternoons digging nest chambers to fill with pollen the next day. They live in a nest until the chambers are all complete, then make a new one.

Squash bee nest hole

So how do you attract these wonderful creatures to your garden?  Plant squash, of course, and have some bare, untilled dirt next to the squash for the nests.  Read more!

Watching Grass Grow: Buffalo 2.0 Is Now a Meadow

A meadow is grass with wildflowers ...and I have it!  At least in parts of the lawn, if you squint just right, I have fluffy clumps of grass with scattered flowers.

Jute mesh, new grass, and some wildflowers (Ratibida columnaris)

It's been slow to establish for several reasons:

• We had a cooler spring than usual.
• The summer rains have not come yet.
• I did not till or amend the area before planting.
• The seeds are not a select improved "turf" strain, it's just generic buffalo grass and blue grama grass. 
• I fertilized very lightly and did not fertilize early.
• Most of the wildflowers are perennials and will not bloom well this year. 

The erosion control mesh is doing exactly what I need it to do - when I water the mesh fills with water like waffles fill with syrup and it sinks in instead of running off.  I am watering daily to encourage the final grass seeds to sprout, with an occasional seep watering to get the roots to go deep.  I really need some rainstorms. Read more!