2 MILLION BLOSSOMS In the last year, I have become obsessed with the beauty
and behavior of wasps. I follow them as they interact with the plants in my yard and neighborhood. In mathematical terms, my obsession makes sense. Insects have been here millions of years longer than we have, and there are magnitudes more insects than there will ever be of us. The order Hymenoptera, allies, has slightly over 154,000 described species worldwide. In the Sonoran Desert of Arizona where I live there are a few thousand wasp species. Nobody knows exactly how many. Paper wasps are social wasps, their colonies usually
from the help of co-foundresses. Within this subfamily Polistes, the umbrella wasps, a subset named for the shape of their nests. Worldwide, there are more than 200 different Polistes species, with 21 native to North America. In my part of the Sonoran Desert, The orange blossom trees in my neighborhood bloom at the end of winter. The scent is always more beautiful than remembered. The car accident that led me back to photography also caused a loss of smell from the injury to my brain. New scent pathways would be born, my neurologist had assured me. Orange blossom was the perfume of that From behind a leaf in my neighbor’s orange tree,
she peeked out at me, a female Polistes aurifer. Given the time of year and seasonal conditions, she was most likely an overwintered young wasp, destined to become a queen, the new blooms, such a gyne lives a solitary life, foraging for nectar to build up her energy reserves. Then she must generation of larvae by herself. Polistes means “city builder.” The female wasp chews up
dead wood and mixes it with saliva to create the handmade, or better said mandible-made, paper to build her nest. She uses her antennae to measure the angles of y-shaped intersections, walking and measuring as she constructs the hexagon-shaped cells of this seasonal home. Hanging lamp- like from a stalk, the paper nest has no protective envelope, but it is water resistant. Many Polistes species co-found nests, including P. aurifer.
Was this curious wasp holding my gaze royalty? Was she bravely starting a nest from scratch on her own? Or could she be a co-foundress, helping another queen found a colony? From behind the chewed up leaf, she watched me watch
her. Perhaps the chewed-up leaf was a sign of caterpillar feeding. She and her future offspring are primarily caterpillar hunters, although other soft-bodied insects also fall prey. Her strong mandibles enable her to capture, kill, and masticate
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a source of energy rich nectar that will allow her colony to grow. Her hunting and feeding provides the orange tree predation defense and pollination services.
On the Hunt Plants don’t move. Rooted to the ground, they can’t. The wasps come to the plants and I follow them. In my front yard the fallugia, also known as the Apache plume, blooms on and off throughout the year. I spotted a female Polistes flavus Wasps do not intentionally forage for pollen, but they spread At the end of May, the fallugia still bloomed. I spotted
a male P. aurifer. Colonies only produce males when they our desert spring and are reared later in the season, when the colony also produces new queens. Spotting a male meant that somewhere nearby, a colony had achieved reproductive success. Wasps are incredible hunters. They need to procure
protein-rich meals for their carnivorous larvae to grow, colony. They exude profuse amounts of salivary secretions that the adults lap up, potentially gaining both sugars and amino acids—the building blocks for more complex proteins. Flying from plant to plant, or low over the dirt, female
wasps search for nectar and prey. I never hear them. Scaling appear suddenly, and hold my eye and attention with their wardrobe of the sun—golds, yellows, lush reds, and muted browns. I have never seen a wasp who isn’t astonishingly beautiful. And each time I see a wasp, the wasp sees me. The people I once tried to photograph were irritated by my attention. The wasps don’t seem to mind. To me, they seem to possess a wide range of behaviors: gentle, shy, wary, curious, relaxed, and accepting of my presence. Sometimes they seem completely oblivious of their surroundings when feeding.
Elusive and Elegant Some wasps are more elusive than others. This female P. comanchus navajoe appeared for only moments among the branches of a red bird of paradise and then disappeared. Her perch was immediately taken over by P. aurifer wasps. I was lucky to have seen this shy wasp, wary of both my presence and her competitors. Timing sometimes favors the patient and prepared.
Creating a tapestry of color that brightens our neighborhood yards and alleyways, red bird of paradise blooms profusely during the extreme heat of summer. The
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