Ichneumon Wasp

Between recently traveling on vacation and subsequent computer issues, I haven't posted much lately. I'm back from vacation and have fixed most of the computer issues. This has allowed me to produce the images I wanted to for my last post on the status of my carrot breeding efforts.

I've got several posts in the works, but for now I'm just going to show you this cool wasp I found a few months back. It, like most wasps, is female. When I found her she was probing the wood surface with her dramatically extended ovipositor. The ovipositor, and my limited entomological knowledge, identifies this as an ichneumon wasp of the family Ichneumonoidea.

Wasps in this family are parasitoids, meaning they inject their eggs into other insects for their larva to feed upon. I suspect this lady was trying to find a wood-boring beetle larvae to inject her eggs into, since the wood itself wouldn't provide for her children.


References:

• the-biologist-is-in.blogspot.com/2016/09/making-my-own-carrots-6.html
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichneumonoidea
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid