Published July 23, 2007
What makes grown men flail their arms and run around the backyard shrieking like girls?
Dive-bombing flying insects as big as your thumb, that's what.
There's been a lot of flailing and running and shrieking around here lately.
Actually, the above scene could be juxtaposed with a magnified version of the scene I am about to describe, and a filmmaker would have himself quite a horrifying Grade B science fiction movie.
A huge striped wasp - the same bug (or its cousin) that has been terrifying swimmers in my backyard - was dragging a big, fat dead cicada into the crevice between the concrete walkway and the pool.
The wasp squirmed down in the hole and tried to pull the fat cicada in after it.
The cicada was clearly twice the size of the hole and its predator.
But the wasp didn't give up.
The dead cicada seemed to move of its own accord like those metal filings in those board games in which you put a beard on a man with a magnet.
But it wasn't a magnet that was levitating the bug; it was another insect.
You could see the wasp's furry little insect legs sticking up through the hole trying to get some leverage as it twisted and turned and tugged at its prey to get it into the hole.
The hard-working bug - according to Shelly Hill, program assistant for horticulture at Lorain County's Ohio State Extension office - is actually called a cicada killer wasp or, scientifically, sphecius speciosus.
Hill convinced me, and now I'm trying to convince you, to please stop swatting and bug-poisoning these annoying dive-bombing bugs that are almost as big as hummingbirds.
"They are beneficial," Hill told me in that sweet bug-loving entomologist way, "and very interesting."
Cicadas - not the 17-year locusts we are all familiar with but the ones called "dog day cicadas" that come around annually - will eat trees and eat the roots of trees.
"The cicada killer wasps go after them," she said.
And although they will dive-bomb you - that is the aggressive male, by the way - they don't sting.
The males don't even have stingers and the females will only sting if cornered or trapped - like in laundry brought in from the clothesline, she said.
I told her about watching a cicada killer fly back and forth over the same small area of grass day after day.
She told me that what I was seeing was probably the same male guarding his brood of eggs or larvae in the ground below.
"The male is real aggressive toward its young," Hill said. "He doesn't have a stinger, but he will head-bang you if you get in his way."
The wasps' life cycle parallels that of the cicada, spanning 60-75 days from mid-July to mid-September. They are solitary insects. They don't live in colonies. There is no queen. Just a bunch of little cicada-killer families. The female lays eggs in the ground, and in one or two days larvae hatch from them. The insects spend about two weeks as larvae before becoming fearsome cicada killers.
Boy, am I glad I didn't kill that diligent dad. I considered it. I wanted to. But, I couldn't find a flyswatter.
So anyway, the next time I walked past that crevice into which the wasp had been trying to pull its levitating prey, the cicada was gone. Either the wasp managed to wedge it into the hole or he swallowed it whole.
"That's kind of surprising that it was trying to take it underground," Hill said. "They usually fly up into the trees with them."
Oh, now that's a comforting thought.
What makes grown men flail their arms and run around the backyard shrieking like girls?
Dive-bombing flying insects as big as your thumb, that's what.
There's been a lot of flailing and running and shrieking around here lately.
Actually, the above scene could be juxtaposed with a magnified version of the scene I am about to describe, and a filmmaker would have himself quite a horrifying Grade B science fiction movie.
A huge striped wasp - the same bug (or its cousin) that has been terrifying swimmers in my backyard - was dragging a big, fat dead cicada into the crevice between the concrete walkway and the pool.
The wasp squirmed down in the hole and tried to pull the fat cicada in after it.
The cicada was clearly twice the size of the hole and its predator.
But the wasp didn't give up.
The dead cicada seemed to move of its own accord like those metal filings in those board games in which you put a beard on a man with a magnet.
But it wasn't a magnet that was levitating the bug; it was another insect.
You could see the wasp's furry little insect legs sticking up through the hole trying to get some leverage as it twisted and turned and tugged at its prey to get it into the hole.
The hard-working bug - according to Shelly Hill, program assistant for horticulture at Lorain County's Ohio State Extension office - is actually called a cicada killer wasp or, scientifically, sphecius speciosus.
Hill convinced me, and now I'm trying to convince you, to please stop swatting and bug-poisoning these annoying dive-bombing bugs that are almost as big as hummingbirds.
"They are beneficial," Hill told me in that sweet bug-loving entomologist way, "and very interesting."
Cicadas - not the 17-year locusts we are all familiar with but the ones called "dog day cicadas" that come around annually - will eat trees and eat the roots of trees.
"The cicada killer wasps go after them," she said.
And although they will dive-bomb you - that is the aggressive male, by the way - they don't sting.
The males don't even have stingers and the females will only sting if cornered or trapped - like in laundry brought in from the clothesline, she said.
I told her about watching a cicada killer fly back and forth over the same small area of grass day after day.
She told me that what I was seeing was probably the same male guarding his brood of eggs or larvae in the ground below.
"The male is real aggressive toward its young," Hill said. "He doesn't have a stinger, but he will head-bang you if you get in his way."
The wasps' life cycle parallels that of the cicada, spanning 60-75 days from mid-July to mid-September. They are solitary insects. They don't live in colonies. There is no queen. Just a bunch of little cicada-killer families. The female lays eggs in the ground, and in one or two days larvae hatch from them. The insects spend about two weeks as larvae before becoming fearsome cicada killers.
Boy, am I glad I didn't kill that diligent dad. I considered it. I wanted to. But, I couldn't find a flyswatter.
So anyway, the next time I walked past that crevice into which the wasp had been trying to pull its levitating prey, the cicada was gone. Either the wasp managed to wedge it into the hole or he swallowed it whole.
"That's kind of surprising that it was trying to take it underground," Hill said. "They usually fly up into the trees with them."
Oh, now that's a comforting thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment