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  • From: "kieran or donna" <redherring@tnaccess.com>
  • To: <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Alternative pollinators
  • Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 23:44:24 -0500

By the time the goldenrod is blooming, we'll have lots of strange wasps with
long thin abdomens. Not mud daubers, not ichneumans, all I know about them
is that they spend a lot of time on flowers. I don't know any kind of fruit
that bloom that late though. We get fuzzy little digger bees in the spring,
a few BOBs (I haven't set up any housing for them) and the specialist pepo
bees in the squash.
Not pollinators but very interesting all the same are the mud daubers.
I grew up with the black and yellow mud daubers with the long thin abdomen.
Around here we have only the iridescent wasp-shaped blue daubers. I have
read that they are parasitic on the other kind, but seeing as we don't have
the other kind, I don't think that is the case. These mud daubers stockpile
spiders. They are especially fond of the standard barn spiders, (our local
Araneus types), and black widows. I begrudge them the former but not the
latter. If they are disturbed or have to crawl through a tight spot, they
tend to drop or lose their spider, so it's not uncommon to find stunned
black widows lying about. It's a nice easy way to get to see some
interesting variation in widows. One of them I saw had brown legs and a
"broken" hourglass, quite atypical. The only web spiders that are really
safe are the big garden spiders, but even they have to skulk about until
they get too big to carry back to the nest. The hard shelled ones, the
Micranthena (I'm figuring maybe at least one of you have the little Golden
Guide to spiders too), are apparently too hard to sting once they get a
certain size, as they sit proudly in their webs in the daytime.
Someone said that some kind of tiny wasp was parasitising their bees.
When a mud dauber brings a spider to their nest, sometimes one or more tiny
flies begin hovering and darting at the spider, and the dauber really hates
them. She may fly up to avoid them, or grab at them. Apparently they want
to lay eggs on the spider, and I'd guess that their eggs will hatch sooner
and eat up all the food before the single wasp egg hatches.
We have lots of carpenter bees here, eating everything made of wood, and
they do lots of pollinating, esp cross pollinating of beans I'd like to keep
pure. My husband just read that the reason that the wild black honeybees
did so much better than the tame bees during all the mite years is that they
make a slightly smaller size comb from what the machine made comb foundation
forces the tame bees to make. This makes the wild bees a trifle smaller so
the tracheal mites can't fit, period. I know that for years we just didn't
see any tame yellow honeybees, only the dark wild ones.
Well, all for now. I am very sorry to hear about Tom. Donna





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