Wasps Cut Their Prey Into Pieces For Easy Transport
Wasps Cut Their Prey Into Pieces For Easy Transport
Wasp Control
Not long ago a video was posted to Reddit that showed a yellowjacket wrestling a bee. After a moment of roughhousing, the yellowjacket gained the upper hand and proceeded to slice the bee’s abdomen clean off. After that, the yellowjacket flew away with the bee’s rear half while the bee’s top half rolled around frantically before dying. This behaviour may seem unreasonably macabre, but this gory form of combat is just the norm for yellowjackets. According to James Carpenter of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, yellowjackets will sometimes cut their prey into pieces in order to make transporting the corpse easier; instead of struggling to carry an entire bee corpse, it makes more sense to transport the bee in lighter loads over multiple trips. Sometimes, yellowjackets will even chew-up the most nutritious parts of their prey so that they can mold the chewed-up matter into little balls that are easy to transport. Not only are yellowjackets brutal predators, but they are also more vicious than most other flying insects, especially bees.
The term “yellowjacket” refers to a group of predatory wasps. Yellowjackets possess relatively large scissor-like mouthparts that are ideal for trapping and gnawing at prey. Yellowjackets are the primary predators of bees, and some types of yellowjackets specialize in attacking entire beehives. This makes raising bees an impossibility in territories that also contain yellowjacket colonies. Yellowjackets do not have to expend much energy in order to obtain their tasty bee-meals. Yellowjackets will hang around a beehive’s opening with the hopes that a few bees will exit the hive. Each bee that leaves the hive is promptly killed by the yellowjackets. Bees can protect themselves with their stinger, but yellowjackets and other wasps are much larger than bees, which provides the winning advantage. However, bees have developed a number of unusual self-defense tactics. For example, bees can work together to raise the body temperature of predatory wasps until the wasp dies of hyperthermia.
Can you tell the difference between yellowjackets and bees when spotting one of the two in the wild?