Wasps don't get enough love. The parasitic ones help control caterpillars in my garden and pollinate.
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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UK Nature and Environment
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It's hard to find love when you act like a fucking dick all the time
They are not all aggressive. This one didn't mind me watching her lay her eggs and seal the nest.
wow, that is a wasp? it looks really nice!
Yeah, quite beautiful, my potato phone doesn't do it justice
I’m a big fan of trichogramma wasps, myself.
I had a pantry moth infestation as a result of having birds (inherited from my mother - I’d never keep birds of my own choice, and I rehomed them after a few years)
Anyway, because I had birds and cats, bug bombs were out of the question, but I found trichogramma wasps. They are stingless wasps about the size of a grain of sand, 1-2 mm tops, so you can barely see them, and they lay their egg inside moth eggs (and some 100 other species of mostly pest insects, but they prefer what they hatch from which is typically moth eggs) their daughter eats the moth larva, hatches, and can immediately lay fertile eggs in more moth eggs. No males in the species due to a gut bacteria, so all wasps hatch fertile.
If anyone reading this needs this info, you can buy trichogramma wasps online, they aren’t expensive, you’ll want ~5k eggs for up to 2k sqft indoors (most sites I’ve seen this is the minimum order anyway, and back when I did it 8 years ago or so, cost me about $12/order, including shipping). They will escape through the window screens, and just die off if there aren’t enough target species’ eggs around, which is fine and not a problem. They can wipe out up to 95% of a targeted species when outdoors, but moths have a long life cycle so you need time to work through all the waves in your enclosed space. Just open the little cup inside, set it down somewhere near the kitchen or where you have the most moths, and that’s it. Repeat every 2-3 weeks until you don’t see moths anymore, which takes about 4-6 months. After that, for two more years, any time you see a moth inside, order another round and release them. This is a precautionary measure in case you still have a residual population hiding somewhere.
I amused by how chaotic their moves seem to be. They can just hang in one place if they want, they do, but when there's something of interest, like an open food plate or a smelly basket with it, they'd fly like waplane pilots avoiding enemy fire and one way or another land on target and\or try to sneak into a container. Although I fear their nests on discovery, I kinda enjoy to observe how they wrote themselves into a context of human's countryside, and, unlike many other creatures, they don't damage plants and buildings, unlikely to poison you and are comparatively rare to occupy isolated living spaces.
Fuck wasps, especially yellow jackets.