Great Golden Digger Wasp & Swamp Milkweed

Having indigenous plants in our yard means we have better relationships with the neighbours. The Hymenopterans regularly come by for a meal and to help make some seed. Included in the Hymenoptera order of insects are bees, wasps, ants and sawflies. Bees, wasps and ants along with butterflies, moths, flies and hummingbirds are the most frequent pollinators visiting our yard. These Great Golden Digger Wasps were among the neighbours who have been by over the past few weeks. They are big wasps with bright orange legs and a covering of golden hairs on their bodies. Unlike social wasp species like the paper nest builders, Great Golden Diggers are solitary and harmless to humans unless an attempt is made to handle them. Males don’t have stingers and females reserve their limited venom to subdue the grasshoppers and crickets they capture to provide food for their young. Females excavate a burrow with several side chambers and then subdue a cricket, grasshopper or katydid with their venom. Once paralyzed, they fly or drag the insect to their excavations. Birds sometimes notice and have been known to pester them until they drop their prey. Once at the burrow she hauls the insect into a side tunnel and lays a single egg on it. Females can carry sperm from their mates for weeks. She then seals that tunnel and repeats the process. After all her eggs are laid in the burrow she camouflages it from those who might come looking for the larvae. Once the larvae hatches it consumes the subdued insect alive, then spins a cocoon. The following June it hatches into an adult. Adults repeat the cycle for 6-8 weeks in June and July as pollinators, nectar sippers and cricket hunters. The whole process strikes me like a real-life Alien movie. Gruesome. Yet beyond their role as pollinators, these wasps help keep populations of pest insects that eat crops in check. They are the best kind of Alien neighbours.