The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - let's talk about Yellow Jackets, Hornets, and Honey bees with Dr. Michael Skvarla andKate Anton from Penn State.

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Interviews with Experts:  Audio from this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Od_vWKexZEo

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with experts. I'm Frederick Dunn and this is The Way to Be. Today we're touching on several insect species, including wasps, honeybees, and will address some common misconceptions. My guests are Kate Anton, who is the Grosinger Laboratory Manager and Beekeeper. Kate manages colonies for research focused on ecology, nutrition, landscape, bee health, and genomics, special interest in social insects and Dr. Michael Skvarla. Michael is an assistant research professor

of anthropod identification in the Department of Entomology at Penn State University. His current research is focused on deer kids. Read more in the video description below. Here's Kate and Michael. So I want to thank everyone for being here today and my guests are Kate Anton and and Mike Scavara. And I'd like you both to start off, please, just by introducing yourselves who you are, where you are, and what you do starting with Kate. Hi, my name is Kate Anton. I'm the lab manager and beekeeper for the Grosinger Lab.

And I also work with Dr. Robin Underwood. And together, we give advanced bekeeping education programs through extension. One of my specialties is honeybee reproduction. I rear a lot of queens. I breed bees for research in the Grosendur Labway study. A lot of things about ecology, landscape, but also genomics, and that requires honeybee breeding. So I developed a skill set there that's been very helpful to a lot of the goals of many advanced beekeepers, particularly in the Northeast. I also am a lover of other social insects, including wasps and ants. That's fantastic. So welcome. And Michael?

Sure. My name is Michael Skavarla. I'm an assistant research professor at Penn State, and I run the insect identification lab here. So I get identification requests from mostly folks in Pennsylvania, but also throughout the Northeast. And really, I've gotten at this point requests from every continent in the world. and when people send me insects, you know, photos and emails or specimens in the mail, I identify the insect or other arthropod for them. If it's a pest, I let them know how to control it if control is necessary. I dabble in a little bit of research primarily with medical and veterinary entomology, but because I'm dealing with all kinds of different things from the public, from bedbugs to wasps to ants to, you know, spiders, anything you could think.

of I kind of dabble in a whole lot of different things, including wasps and bees. Oh, that's fantastic. It's all going to tie in. I can suggest something that somebody probably sent to you that has never happened, I'm sure, but they send you a picture of Vespa for Bro and say, Murder Hornet. Yes, all the time. If I had a nickel. So there's a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings.

out there. So today, and boy, everything we're talking about, these are broad and scope, I think it's great that you're into Arakness as well because I love those too. The bold jumping spider in particular beekeepers are familiar because every colony seems to have a resident bold jumping spider. That's not what we're here to talk about today. We're going to talk about something that's going to be putting pressure on a lot of beekeepers apiaries and their bees, and it's the yellow jacket, and there are a lot of misunderstandings if anyone's ever put posted a short video or a photo about a yellow jacket. There are a lot of ideas about what they are and what they aren't.

One of the first things I'd like to talk about is we're here in the Northeastern United States, the state of Pennsylvania, so for those who are watching, some of the information may be regional. And yellow jackets do not identify just one subspecies, right? So who would like to take the handle on introducing the yellow jacket? Okay, Mike. Sure. So we've got about 10 species of yellow jackets here in Pennsylvania. Within North America, we're actually one of the hotspots for yellow jacket diversity,

like of all things. And yeah, we've got a number of species. We've actually got a couple different major groups of yellow jackets here, different species groups. And that can be important because species in the different species groups have somewhat different biologies. So one of these species groups that make small nests with low numbers of workers, maybe a few hundred and the nests die out by the end of August. They're not usually pests because they're not very numerous. They're primarily predators, so they're not going after things like carbohydrates.

The other species group make the big nests that, you know, you run over with your lawnmower and they come out and sting you because there's 3,000 wasps in a nest. They're the ones that go after protein and carbohydrates in the falls. or their pests at your picnic or your garbage can. Those are all within the genus Vespula. There's another genus, Dulacovisbula, which contains bald-faced hornets, which many people are aware of. But another species called aerial yellow jackets,

Dulcobisbula are in Aria, they look like other yellow jackets. They don't look like bald-faced hornets that are black and white. They're the typical, you know, small size, black and yellow body coloration. But whereas most other yellow jackets are nesting in the ground or in things that are like the ground, you know, inside a wall, inside, uh, under your siding, a place that mimics like a preexisting cavity in the ground.

Aerial yellow jackets are making exposed aerial nests like their bald-faced hornet cousins in the same genus. So yeah, we've got a lot of them surprisingly. And they're kind of doing slightly different natural history behavior type things. Oh, go ahead, Kate. I can tell you where quite a number of those nests are near my field lab. Which are we talking in ground or the ones that are on the trees? They're living in, is it, oh, I can never get this right, so soft it is the overhang.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in several buildings near my B-Lab. Okay. And this is an important topic because this time of year, people magically, oh, this nest appeared overnight. You know, I've been walking this way every day. And I look up and I've got bald-faced hornets, first of all, not true hornets.

So it's interesting that we can talk on that too. And then the yellow jackets, their paper nests hanging from a tree can look very similar. Is there a way to safely look at that hanging nest on a tree? and know that it's, first of all, our bald-faced hornets in the yellow jacket family. Are they related? They are considered yellow jackets? They are considered yellow jackets. No, the black and white does make the name confusing.

Okay, yeah. And they have nicknames, Bullet Hornet, Bull Hornet, and people quickly understand why they get that name. So I'm going to tie this in because skunks around where I am eat these yellow jackets. So they'll dig the ones out of the ground. which is one of the reasons I like scunts. They also predate on honey bees by scratching the landing boards and things like that. But I had a, I still call them paper wasp, but is it right to call a yellow jacket of paper wass?

Because they use cellulose to construct their nest, but that's a different species, right? So paper wasps are a different group entirely. They're in the genus Polystis. They make the kind of open umbrella nests that aren't enclosed by a paper sheath. similar to bold-faced hornets. All of these social wasps, Dolica Vespula, the bold-faced hornets, an area yellow jackets, Vesbula, the yellow jackets, Vespa, the true hornets, and then Pallistis, the paper wasps, all of them are in the family Vespiti.

So they're all related, but some of them are in different sub-families, different genera. So, you know, they're more related to each other than they are, say, other ones. but there's some differences there. Okay. So they do use cellulose. They're just not called a paper wasp. Again, so like this is my, that's my bald face, weren't it? Ness back there.

They're just my friends. So they hang out with me in here. So they died. Anyway, a nest blew out of the tree of yellow jackets. It was predated upon by a skunk, pull it apart, scattered everything everywhere. So just for an experiment, I gathered them together, put it in a, a suet feeder and hung that on a tree, all the bits and parts. I think I have the queen there too.

So we're going to get into the kind of the biology at the end of the year. What's going on with these yellow jackets? Beekeepers want to kill them. I don't think we need to. We have ways that hopefully we can get into with Kate here about beekeepers and what they can do to protect the colony or help them defend themselves from the yellow jackets. But my questions are about the biology of the yellow jacket. If I've got the queen and everything, we're late in the year.

We're September at the time that we're making this video. So even though there are a lot of foragers on the nest, they've reconstructed it. I think there's probably a queen, but if she lays an egg, how long does it take for that egg to go through all of its phases and come out as an adult, Michael? Let me look. I don't know. I wasn't expecting that. You want to expect.

These other social wasps and other bees, they're not going to behave in the same way as honeybees, because of course honeybees are master regulators of their environment. We expect workers to take exactly 21 days to emerge, right? But that's because the honeybee colony is keeping their nest at perfect temperature and humidity. So you're not going to find the same thing in organisms that have a different lifestyle. So in the ground, they're going to be subject to a bit more temperature changes and cooler temperatures. And I would think that by moving them to an aerial nest, you may have changed.

Those are not in the ground yellow jackets. They were actually a nest on a tree branch. A storm came through, knocked it down, skunks ate it toward a fart. So it was, we put it right next to the same branch. So some people are following along. We've been showing weekly video updates of that nest. So they were actually on a tree branch. They were those yellow jackets.

We'll see when Michael brings the jury. But I think them being aerial and exposed, there would be variation in the time of development based on the temperature. Yeah. And I did do thermal scans. They don't warm their nest, just as Kate described. the way honeybees do. And it seems like I can just tell when the workers are about to fly out

because the thoraxes heat up. And then those little dots go out. They're not heating their eggs or larvae at all. So this is very interesting to me. And what did you find, Michael? I looked at variable numbers. So one source said 20 days for the egg to hatch. Another said about 30 days for the larvae to develop into an additional.

adult. Another gave 18 to 20 days for larvae to go from larva to adult. So it seems like it's a little bit all over the place. Given that there's some diversity here, it may vary as well by species. So, but you're looking anywhere, my guess would be 20 to 30 days. Okay. So then my next question to that is, so if we have egg to adult 30 days, let's say, what's the lifespan of an adult in the nest? Probably a couple of weeks to maybe a month. So we're going to have a colony. The queen lives longer. So she'll be there.

So we'll have a nest that just has at some point nothing but QPi, right? And no attending foragers at all, right? Because they wouldn't live long enough to be present while the larvae finish out their development. Maybe. I'd be interested to see. Oh, we're going to see because that's. I'm doing the video. That's why we're here.

Right. And I think I'm going to have a nest that I can just pick up. It's only going to have the queen in it. What's the life expectancy of the queen? The whole season, right? Whole season. Okay. So I'll go ahead.

Oh, no. The one neat thing, though, is if you only had workers, if the queen's dead, but the workers are still there, they're like honeybees. They're sterile or they're unmated. But they can still lay sterile eggs or unfa. Damn it. They can let unfertilized eggs, and those will develop into males. So they make haploid.

Yeah, they're haploid. And so even if the queen's gone, they'll, because she's not there to exert control over the nest, they'll start laying eggs. So you can still get larval to adult development with new wasps. They'll just all be males. And they won't be able to do anything. Now, will the males be able to do anything to help with? No.

They don't do anything but loaf around until it's time to make. So they're like honeybees in that regard, right, Kate? Okay, so we have now they, it's natural for them to produce drones at the end of the year because they have to mate with the queens that are going to go out that are going to overwinter. So they feed on soft-body insect. So let's hit on the benefits of having Yellow Jacket Woss before we hit on the negative aspect, which is they can take out a honeybee column. So let's talk about the benefits.

Who wants to go first? Okay. Yellow jacket? The yellow jacket, benefits of the yellow jacket. I actually like yellow jacket. Sorry. I actually like yellow jackets, at least some of them. So I mentioned there's a couple different species groups that we have in Pennsylvania.

Species in the Rufa species group, they're the ones that make the small nests that are die out typically by the end of August, early September. So they're about done by now. They're strictly predatory on other insects. they only go out there primarily going after things like caterpillars. They'll also hit other soft-bodied insects. Paper wasps are the same way. They're caterpillar specialists. And so they're great biocontrol if you've got a nest that is in an area where you're not going to disturb it and make them come out and sting you.

If you've got to say a paper wasp nest up in your eaves, but it's two stories up, I wouldn't bother getting on a ladder to go deal with it. I would let it, you know, let those wasps kill all the caterpillars around my property. Same with these Rufa species group yellow jackets. They're strictly predatory. They're doing biocontrol in the area. The problem is with the other species group, the Bulgaris species group. They're the ones that get big at the end of the fall, you know, three to five thousand workers. They switch from being strictly predatory earlier in the summer to scavenging this time of year.

And they also start picking up more carbohydrates to feed the development. in queens and males. And so the nests are bigger. They're switching to things that bring them into contact with people like scrap food, like garbage cans, like pop and soda, you know. And so there's multiple reasons that they're now coming into more contact with people compared to earlier in the year when they're strictly predatory then going after insects and not really bothering you and also having that smallerness size that is more difficult to kind of disturb. So they're great to have around part of the year. Yeah.

So Kate, did you have anything to add? Well, I think that there's really a missed opportunity in observing these yellow jackets and their behavior. We at my house, my husband and I find them really interesting. And when you, I feel like there's, we have this culture of. they're scary, they're bad. But I'm not sure there's that much truth to it for the most part, assuming you're not running your lawnmower over their nest.

So what we do is, you know, when we find the nests, I usually put like a branch, a thin branch in it as a flag so that the mower stays away from it. But we enjoy going down to the garden and checking on our yellow jackets. They're, you know, it's really interesting what they do. And as long as you're gentle, you can get very close and observe them. So it's really fun to see what they're doing. And sadly, when we get flooding rains, they get taken out sometimes.

So, you know, I've observed so many things in my garden that, you know, we do all this research in the lab, right? But when I'm out there observing it myself, I feel like I get so much better insight into the behavior of these animals and the other paper wasps. I have yet to do this. But apparently you can set colored construction paper out and sometimes take it and integrate it into their nests. And if that is not keeping up with the Joneses, I don't know what is. But yeah, I think it's a great thing about them. They can disprove this bias we have that they're out to get us. And we can learn so much about their behavior.

Wasp have great facial recognition of each other. So they know their nestmates. Right. And they did those tests where they changed the markings on their faces and got their nesstimates rejected just from the visual change. That's very interesting. Yeah. And I'm glad that you brought that up.

So that's interesting. So we're telling people put out yellow and red construction paper. and let them harvest that instead of your unfinished wood fence and see what you get. Yeah. They recycle their own cellulose, too, because the ones I filed into that cage, they reused a bunch of it. What I want to hear from Michael is through observation, often we get invested in the species that we're looking at that we're studying. Give an example of when you were invested in one and they're very disappointed to see it go

at the end of the year, or maybe something happened to it. Maybe something, some predator took it out. Do you have a story to share? No, sorry. No, not like that. Usually when I leave paper wasps and other yellow jackets, I've got young kids and dogs. So I am perhaps a little more liberal than Kate is about taking out nests when they occur.

So I'll leave paper wasps where I'm not going to disturb them. up high. I can't really watch them though. But like this year we had three of them on our pool and I knocked them down because the risk of the kids being stung as they came in and out was much, much higher. So I've never really left them in a place where I could observe them up close because you know, if I was single or just me and my wife, maybe I would, but there's too many risk factors with the things around that would get stung. So. Okay. So I try to. to say hi in a tree, let them be. But of course, if they're in a pathway or something.

Kate, do you have a story where you became attached? Always. I mean, and I just, there's too many, there's too many stories to pick from. There's a lot of drama. And sometimes we've seen yellow jackets, assaulting bald-faced hornet nests. Like, small ones. We've seen a lot of sagas go on, which, We love the bald face hornets.

Now, what are they taking away from the bald face hornet now? I think they're killing their brute, eating their brood. They're taking a larvae because it would be the soft-bodied ones that they'd be after. Yeah. Do they ever really predate upon adult wasps? I don't know. I did not see that. So maybe I should just switch careers right now.

Well, just start staring, you know. And always, ABC, always bring your camera. You need to document these things. But we just lost a yellow ground nest earlier this year from some, we had really, really heavy rainfall. And it was very near where we had a nest last year, but we also had a bumblebee nest in a similar area. And the same thing happened.

The bumblebees got killed by, you know, we had two, three inches of brain situation. and I felt so sad. And it kind of made me wonder is, you know, these climate changes that we're having, you know, with more epic rainfall events going to be negatively impacting ground nesting insects and probably other animals. Now, Michael, do you have any sense of the population is declining? Are we losing species? Are they kind of status quo? What's been the impact that you're aware of?

Sure. So this actually came up a couple of years ago. If people recall back in 2020, we had the quote-unquote murder hornet scare during the pandemic. And my lab got absolutely flooded with identification requests of European hornets, which occur in Pennsylvania. They've been here since the 1850s or so. Everybody saw those, was convinced that they were seeing them for the first time, even though they've been here for 150 years. And I got, oh God, probably a thousand ID requests of European Hornets that year. And a lot of people asked, like, I'm seeing more of these or I'm seeing them for the first time. So I reached out to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture to ask, you know, what kind of information they have. And they

run trap nests in survey traps in ports of entry and other high risk areas like lumber mills trying to catch invasive species as they come in. But one kind of side benefit of that is they have, you know, this survey data for wasps and hornets going back a bunch of years. And they see no change. There's been no change in their trapping data for the last 20 years. People are seeing these wafts more because they're just more aware of them. You know, the murder hornet thing really scared people. And there's just, it feels like a broader societal acknowledgement that wasps are around and people paying attention to them. But as far as hard data goes, no, there seems to be no change, at least for,

the wasps that the Department of Agriculture is monitoring. Okay, Kate, yeah, I do think there has been a change and it was COVID that made people spend more time at home and then there was a sensational news article and I think people just became more aware of these things when they had a little bit more time to spend with their environment. That's my pet. on why the European Hornets became noticed at a much greater rate. Okay. I think you're right. Yeah.

And I got attached to Vespa Gerbrough in the spring because she started making her nests in our pavilion up by the pond. And I did time lapses that lasted for weeks. So I have all the nests construction and everything going on, everything she did, thermals, everything. and then she just flew out one day. And normally when she flew out, it's when I went up and got close-up macro images of all of her development.

And then she just didn't come back. Must have got predated or something. What a huge waste of time that was. All that data. Of course, I should probably just show it anyway. And then one day they can fly away and we have nothing. But I do want to talk about when we were dealing with honeybees And for those that are listening are likely to be beekeepers, the wasp seem to be able to fly to a honeybee landing board when it's only, you know, 40 degrees in the morning.

And they scoot right in. The bees are still clustered inside. We don't have any guards on the landing board. What is it about a wasp that allows it to fly cold like that? Or why would they be foraging in the cold at the end of the year? and because this is when they start to gain entry into a colony of bees, and then we've got a problem. Please explain if you know why they fly fold,

and the other thing is, what are they after when they get inside the hive at the end of the year? So we're talking about coming up in the next couple of weeks. People are about to see a lot of this activity. Well, I mean, I think that they're, this is to the best of my knowledge, they're just able to vibrate their flight muscles to an extent that they can take flight, right? That they're warm enough for their muscles to work.

I have yellow jackets in my colonies all the time, and I consider it not a big deal at all. Usually thereafter nectar, a larger scale attack, which I don't, I mean, on one hand, I could count the number of times that something like that has happened. and it was in the case of extremely weak mating nukes that I just had after an experiment or something, you know, they'll go after the brood. But strong colonies, it's very unlikely for them to sustain significant damage from yellow jackets. I have lots of yellow jackets around me. They're around in the apiary. I also find bumblebees in all the...

time in my colonies. I usually find him dead. No, I have living ones regularly. We find them dead on the bottom once they get in. And carpenter bees too. But, you know, they're like a minor, very minor nuisance. And certainly restricting the entrance is going to help it be more defensible. But the honeybees are easily able to defend themselves against a yellow jacket.

In Washington State, the losses to yellow checker predation are actually pretty high in beekeepers. Right. Well, it may be situational and also species driven. Yeah. And there's a new player in the game here, the yellow-legged. Is it a yellow-legged hornet or a yellow-legged blouse? They're yellow-legged hornets. They're a vespas species.

They're true hornets. So what can you tell us about those, Michael? they're native to Asia. They were introduced to Europe about a decade ago and they've been spreading over there. So we've kind of expected they might show up here and then they popped up in Georgia last year. They eliminated three nests in Georgia.

I have not looked to see if they found any more this year, but I suspect that they're looking for them and will eliminate them when they find them. They're not as big as the northern giant hornets, the quote-unquote murder hornets that scare people so bad. They're honestly not much bigger than bald-faced hornets. The problem is the nest size gets large. They'll get a thousand workers in a nest.

And like the bald-faced hornets, they build kind of big aerial nests that are covered at a paper covering. And so, you know, when a nest is up at the top of a tree, 30, 60, 100 feet away, it can be difficult to distinguish them from bold-faced hornet nests because they're about the same size and shape, which might be part of the reason that they may have gone undetected here because people would just confuse them for our native species. There are reports of them being very damaging to honeybee colonies in France. They probably act similar here, but with only being here so recently, we don't really know what the impact is going to be. We also don't know where they're going to go.

What climate models there are show them not quite reaching Pennsylvania because it's too cold here. So even if they get into the southeast, I mean, they are in the southeast. If they're not eliminated, if they spread, they still might not make it here and be an issue in Pennsylvania at least. It may be a regional issue. And I understand they practice this behavior called hawking, where they hover in front of the hive and incoming bees just getting nabbed right out of the air. Are they killing the bees so they can access the hive or they actually utilizing the thoraxe of the bees as protein? So they're different from some other b,

from some other wasps that will say attack a beehive, kill the workers and then go in for the brood. The hawking, they're going after the thorax. So they'll hawk at beehives, but they'll also hawk over flowers. They're really just going after, you know, bee-sized insects that are attracted to flowers. They'll go after other wasps. They'll take flies.

It's just a beehive is a really convenient place for them to go get the kind of prey that they are going after in other situations. Kate, did you have anything that had? Oh, no. I was just actually wanted to ask Michael, is there natural climate more of a Mediterranean climate or are they known to be in more temperate areas? I have to look. They're in Southeast Asia, native. They're in France. I think they've picked them up in southern Germany as well.

They haven't picked them up in more northern areas of Europe. And Europe is typically somewhat warmer than, you know, adjacent, or the same latitude as North America. So France is going to be warmer than Pennsylvania. But again, they haven't made into those more northern areas. So that doesn't mean that they can't. We just, based on current climate models, they probably can't get the Pennsylvania, but also the climate's shifting.

So maybe that'll change in 10 or 20 years. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. For example, we had a mild winter here last year. So last winter, which is why I think we have so many wasps now that survived under. More Queens made it through, right? but we of course don't really have a way of assessing those numbers other than observant you know people that are in their backyards and things right so for overwinter in queens like that the the mildness of the winter doesn't really matter that much oh it doesn't um oftentimes so they get

into protected places behind your siding but like under the bark of fallen trees and whatnot um where temperatures are buffered. And they also produce antifreezance in their hemalymph, their insect equivalent of blood, so they can withstand sub-freezing temperatures. And so they just go to sleep. And unless it gets like negative 30 consistently for multiple days in a row, any fluctuations above that aren't really going to matter that much. The problem is going to be for these wasps, if it is really warm and they wake up early and then there's no food, that actually might kill more of them because there's just no food resources and they starve. The other issue you can have is if you have a lot of warm and then cold spells in the spring,

so it warms up to 60 in January for a couple days and then plummets. And you get another one of those in February, a couple in March. Those kind of spikes and then dips again, the wasps will wake up, either not have food resources and starve or not be able to produce those antifreezing compounds quickly after the temperature falls again. And so if you get a bunch of those kind of ups and downs, that can also knock the population back. But if we get a consistently cold or kind of a consistent, even if it's somewhat warm, as long as the temperatures aren't getting really high and then plummeting again,

and if it stays in the 40s, you may not, you probably won't see much. much change in the population because they're just staying asleep. So is there, at what temperature, would it be lethal for the queen? Cold-wise? Yeah. We have those data on bees. Like we know when they go to a coma, chill coma, and then at what point that becomes chilled death, so.

I don't know. I suspect nobody's looked. But I don't, I'd have to dig into the, literature. Could you, do you think, keep them in an observation hype? Yellow jackets? Sure. If you can get the queen to make the nest in there. I've tried a couple times and often what happens is they either just won't build a nest or they'll start and then you kind of open it up for them to go outside and they'll, I don't like this spot. I'm going to go somewhere else and they never come back. Okay. You can keep them in, oh, you can keep them in captivity a little bit.

researchers we had a postdoc in another lab studying those brown wasps yeah you can yeah collect the queens in the spring and have them start a nest in a screened cage and they eat like the same food that many captured wild animals eat and that is cat food now is canned cat food Well, because I do collect, those are the, I call them paperwash, so the kind of brown and orange with the long slender waist. They're super passive. And I take them and I relocate them and I use hot glue to stick them up in a little three-sided shelter on the side of a building and just to see if I can get them going.

And they're very manageable. So I was thinking that maybe what is the term? I call them galleries when they start to make these little levels as they go down when they're building that. What are they called? What's each level actually? What should we be calling that? They're combs. It's just, it's come, but like there's a distinctive, then there's the next level and a bigger one and the next level.

But we just say, would galleries be a good term then? Or is that no? I'm not sure I would have used it. Just to say that they're combs. We need something more creative and descriptive than just to say comb. I think the word gallery is used for the carpenter bee nest, which snagged. Because that's in the tube and they do one after another. So those are galleries?

Well, there, you know, there's little rooms that shoot off. The carpenter bee nest is not just straight. It has little rooms, branches. I'm just going to call it. I don't like carpenter bees. There, I said it. You should bring me back to talk about carpenter bees. They chew right into the side of a beehive, like somebody went up with a drill bit.

And then when they realize it went all the way into the beehive, they just leave and now have another entrance to deal with. I'm not excited about carpenter bees. So tell me that while we're on that, we don't have to stick to just was because Michael's aware of these things too. What are the benefits of the carpenter bee while we're at it? Well, first of all, carbon deer bees are so much more fascinating than you ever realized. They're not exactly solitary bees. So they will live in loose semi-social groups, right? So social insects do these things where they live together and have they take care for offspring that aren't their own.

So carbon deuries don't just live one year. They can live several years and their nests are so valuable that when there's a housing shortage, they will stay in the nest that they were born in and wait for the current queen to die and then take over the nest. So while the, you know, these are called, you know, I think it's called the primary queen or the prime queen is the reproductive one. Her, it may be her sisters or her daughters. Some of them may stay in the nest and wait for her to run out of gas. So when they're foraging, the reproductive queens live about a year and their body wears out and they're done. but her daughter or sister may wait for her to die to inherit the nest and then she'll activate her ovaries and become the prime queen.

Did she know that, Michael? Is this new? Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So, I mean, sometimes they're solitary and sometimes they're not. But the reason it's hard to deter them from somewhere they've already nested is those nests are so valuable that they're willing to wait a year or even two years to inherit a nest. Not good.

Okay. So we're talking about generational wealth now among carbon abuse. Yeah. They also have great facial and kin recognition of each other. So the, you know, non-reproductive inhabitants can help defend the nest. And very interestingly, they emerge late in the summer and forage and overwinter as adults, both the females and males, but they don't mate until the following. spring, which is a very interesting reproductive strategy. And unlike many other bees who emerge

mate and then the males die, you know, in the queen winter. Do you grab the males out of the air just to impress your friends? And another great thing is the males have really fancy mustaches. Mustaches? Not just the yellow. Well, they have that kind of grill on the front. of their face and a lot of male bees, not honeybees, but a lot of male bees have moustaches. Osmia, leaf cutting, and leaf cutting bees, and male bumblebees. They have light markings on the front of their face. Would they be, are any of them coming out this time of year or have we missed that? The male bumblebees are out.

You should be able to find them. The male carpenter bees? Oh, yes. They should be emerging soon. Oh, so they're doing another round. of chewing up our sheds and stuff. Their, you know, their mom laid them as an egg, and then they grew up, and they emerged as an adult late in the summer, and then they go out and forage and eat food,

and then over winter, and then mate the following spring, because that's when are the male carpenter bees annoying, you know, in April and May. Okay. I'm going to try to be happy about them. All right. If you don't paint the wood on your buildings, they're going to be drilling right in. So old nests that they don't reuse, this is back to yellow jackets now. So these are the exposed nests.

We know that they don't reuse the nest. Does that nest serve as a deterrent the following year to keep these or was for making a new nest in the same area? Nope, absolutely not. it's the same reason that, you know, you see on Facebook, oh, blow up a brown paper bag and wasps think it's a nest. People sell those. We're just ruining someone's market right now. Take goodbye to Etsy, you payers. Those don't work either. Okay. Okay. So by keeping the nest like this right here, if I hung that on my porch, it should just be a new nest right next to it. Yeah, they don't care. If anything, they'll harvest paper from the old nest and reuse it. So you're providing them with a resource. I am so glad we're having this conversation.

You agree, Kate? Anything? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it won't work, but they look really cool. I bought some of those, like they look like paper lanterns, just because I thought they were charming decorations. Do they avoid other was species? Like when they're setting up a nest, if there's another wasp around,

would they recognize it and avoid that area? Could we put up, you know, a miniature Vespa mandarinia up there and they would like murder hornet and they would not build there? No, I think the only way. Okay. You just need your favorite one and you should bolster their population and then they will keep the others away by using them as food. I have actually done that. I have put my those, I put the paperwash nests in the B.R to dry. about yellow jackets. It almost worked.

Okay. Oh, do they eat mosquitoes, yellow jackets? Do they collect them? I mean, yellow jackets are generalist predators. They'll tackle and consume anything they can overpower. There's lots of photos of them, you know, taking out housefly-sized insects. Bald-faced hornets will take out yellow jacket-sized insects.

If they could catch a mosquito, they would consume it. But there are day flying mosquitoes like Asian tiger mosquitoes that are a nuisance. But my sense is that you'd never have enough paper or enough yellow jackets in an area to really make a dent. And there's probably other bigger, more tasty prey out there anyhow. They'd rather get a fly that is packed full of protein because of its size than a little dinky mosquito that isn't going to feed them very much. Okay, well, there goes my, see, I'm trying to get people to care about the wasp, and you're not helping. So if they could take out mosquitoes, though, it would be, tell me more about the Asian tiger mosquito. It's an invasive that first popped up in Texas in the 1980s, I want to say, from Asia.

They're a container breeder, so they probably came over in old tires. that's part of the reason that they've spread throughout most of the southeast. They breed in old tires, garbage, stuff lying on the side of the road, any kind of small container. They've made it to southeastern Pennsylvania with climate change. They'll probably make it across most of the state. The problem with them is they're nuisance day biters, so they'll get you at noon one, two, anytime in the afternoon. You know, when people aren't expecting mosquitoes to come bite them, it's a painful bite for their size. And they are vectors of things like dengi, which isn't found in North America, but if we have a local dengue outbreak, they can be a problem. There's some other

things that they can vector as well that can be an issue here, but mostly they're just annoying biters. Can you give me a sense of the size of it? Is it distinctive in some way when we'd see it? We would know it's different from other mosquitoes. They're bigger than many other mosquitoes. not by much, but big enough if you put them side by side with some of the other smaller species, it, you know, maybe another half as big. The distinctive thing about them is they're jet black with really bright white markings, especially on their legs, hence the named Pegger mosquito. Once you've seen them, they're hard to mistake for other mosquitoes in the same area.

Yeah, combined color and pattern with when they're biting you, it's pretty easy to recognize. recognize. And they're day biters. So now what makes their bite more painful than others? Do they not anesthesize the entry wound the way? Because the other mosquitoes spit on us or something, right? Yeah, I'm not sure. Oh, you don't know. So Michael doesn't know. You've reached the limit of my Asian tiger mosquito knowledge. Okay. Well, you said they hurt more. So something really hurt. When I lived in Arkansas, we had them around the house. And it's like, you know when you're bit. Like other mosquitoes, they bite you and fly off and you're like, Yeah, they sneak up on you, then you're itching.

Yeah, but tiger mosquitoes, you know as soon as they bite you. It's, you know, it's an experience. It's not the worst pain ever, but certainly noticeable. I wonder what it is about them that makes them a day biter. Nighttime seems to favor the mosquito because they're just sensing their prey, right? Or the blood source. So in the daytime, what's the benefit? you don't know.

I don't know. They're large mammal biters. So it might just be that they're going after things like, you know, cows and other bovines where they're from water buffalo that are more active in the day. Okay. So at the end of the year, back to the yellow jackets, they're going to eat nothing but nectar. Is that right? End of the year because they're not doing broods.

The adults don't eat the animal protein. So then they're just after the nectar. Is that right? Oh, no, they're still rear and brood till the bitter end, as far as I know. They rear brood right up until it gets so cold that it just kills them? Yeah. In the South, which I should also qualify, my experience that beekeeping in Yellow Jackets is very specific to my work in Pennsylvania and in Central Pennsylvania. But Yellow Jackets will live all year in the South where it's warm.

Right. they're not a so i don't think i think that they just keep going until they can't go anymore yeah it's interesting it's a couple species in particular um vespiel of vulgaris uh that make those multi-annual nests that you know in most cases they die but if you're in southern louisiana maybe you get a couple warm winters and i've seen some photos of these things they'll take over like an entire car because yeah you know the the nest doesn't doesn't die out and they just keep adding to it. They get gigantic. Yeah, I've seen that with all the furniture fully engulfed in the paper nests and everything. Yeah, that's what happens is, you know,

they're normally an annual species, but like Kate said, you get some extenuating circumstances, especially in the South. And they just keep going until some cold snap kills them. Now, have you traveled and looked at some of these mammoth nest structures before? No, I haven't seen them in person. Kate? No. No, but I haven't watched some amazing YouTube video. Yeah, YouTube is definitely the place to learn things for sure, which is what people are watching this on right now. But they're also listening for those who may not know.

This is a podcast and pod being the whole series. Interviews with experts, as it's obvious now with Michael and Kate that we have experts here with us today, even though we don't know everything about everything. Okay. moving on night hunting some wasp species can hunt at night is that correct European hornets are nocturnal species they're the only nocturnal wasp in the area or it the only nocturnal vespid in the area but yeah one of the major complaints that I get from clients with European hornets is these wasps are around my light at night why are they

there and oh sure because they're after the food the other bugs there's yeah they're after the other insects that are attracted to the lights. That's a really easy one. I tell clients, just turn your porch light off and they'll go away, which never seems to occur to them before I tell them that. So do they have good vision, like in low light? Can they actually see you really well? It's also, it's a problem with controlling them, too,

because with a lot of other yellow jackets, we tell people, like, if you're going to control the yellow jacket nest, go out at night because they can't see as well. You're less likely to be stung. that is not true with European Hornets. They can see almost as well as they can in daylight, especially if it's like a full moon. If it's a new moon and there's absolutely no light out,

then they're going to struggle. But if there's a lot of starlight, moonlight, they can see very well. And that can be an issue if you're trying to eliminate the nest. Yeah, so we're getting together and the three of us and we're going to go out and visit a European Hornet Nests in the middle of the night, what should our flashlights be covered with? Should we have, do they pay attention to red light at all?

Or are we just doomed? Are they just going to see us coming and come and get us no matter what? What kind of light could we bring where we could see, but they wouldn't necessarily be aware of us? I think, I'm pretty sure they also can't see in red light, the same way as bees could or they won't see as well. Okay. I'm not 100% sure on that, but, you know, I know it's true of multiple species of bees and ants.

And there is a specific wavelength, which I do not have memorized, but is Googled. And you can buy red lights in that specific wavelength. Or in the range of the, you know, you can buy a red LED bulb. Okay, so there is a red light that would bees also not see it? Yeah, we use it in the lab all the time. And I have some red Christmas lights, actually, that we use in a room that we keep bumblebee colonies in. We are not wearing Christmas lights outside. But if you can find the information about this red light spectrum, that there is a light kind of designated that's within that.

If you would give that to me, we'll provide that to viewers and listeners down in the video description. That would be fantastic. Sure. I will buy that yesterday. Just take my money. And I think, I know one of the grad students was using a red headlamp, like, you know, a regular flashlight one, but a red one when she was doing some nighttime bee work.

So red light is your friend. Which for the record, listeners, beekeepers, we're not recommending you get into your beehives at night. They will be climbing all over your legs. They will be all over you. even though they can't see you. And give the white lights to your best friend. So, okay.

All right. So we're getting some good stuff here. Oh, so another thing I want to settle. Can they spritz venom into the air? Like can they spray venom at your eyes or something? I read that about the baldface hornets could do that. Is that anything you know about? I think that's true, Michael.

Yeah, Mike. I've never heard that. So if it is true, that's something new to me. Maybe it's just another old wives tale that I thought was fact. Okay. Well, we need an answer on that for sure, because I've said it in the past when I was visiting Bald-Face Hornet Ness at night. And Zay can spray venom in your eyes. So I needed Michael to validate that and he failed. So let's move on. Well, I believe that it is true. Oh, did you just look it up? Did you Google it? Well, I just Googled it, but let me get a site in sorts. We'll follow up with this shortly. Okay. So what is the most beneficial wasp species in the state of Pennsylvania and what makes it beneficial to us? If we're talking just the vespids, just the social wasps like we have been, I'd go with either ball-faced hornets or the paper wasps just because they're such good biocontrolers and other insects. they're not as defensive as say yellow jackets, especially when the nests are up and in a spot where you don't disturb them.

They're really not that defensive when they're away from the nests. I love seeing paper wasps around. So I would probably go with those, but I have a bias. I like paper wasps. So they are great past control, you would say. They are. Yeah. Okay. And what pets are they controlling? I have to ask that. Paper wasps are caterpillar specialists.

Okay. So softbody. But not even softbody, just caterpillars. And, you know, if you have a home garden or ornamentals, caterpillars are some of the herbivores that are really going after those kind of plants. So if you can have some help keeping the caterpillars off. Now what about caterpillars like for the monarch butterfly and things like that? Are they not interested in those? do they also predate on those? They will predate monarchs as well. Yellow jackets are one of the big predators of monarch caterpillars. Something like one out of 100 eggs for monarchs goes from egg to adult, so they have a really high mortality rate. European paper wasps are actually,

they're an introduced species from Europe, as you might have guessed from the name. They're one of the biggest mortality factors for monarch, flies in areas that they occur. They also displace native paper wasp species in some situations. So they

I love paper wasps, but I should couch that in, I love native paper wasp species because they're doing what they should be doing. European paper wasps, I kill them whenever I see them because they're invasive and not playing well with others.

So are we telling listeners to kill European paper was? I do. Okay. I'll trust you. They're well established, so it doesn't really make much of a difference. You could kill everyone you found in your entire life, and it would never

it wouldn't dent the population, but it makes me feel better. I would like to add, though, and we're actually working with one of the extension educators for pest control about a updating some pest management practices.

There are a number of ways to go about removing unwantedness, right? And I feel like reaching for the can of raid, we need to, you know, A, it costs money. B, it's, you know, leaching into non-target insects going to the ground. Do you know what kills insects really well? soapy water or just the garden hose. So yeah, exactly, John. Don Ultra free and clear specifically because it's biodegradable and does not mess up the environment. Okay, go ahead.

And if you have a little pressure washer, you know, even that'll, you know, you can just get the nests down that are above your doorway, right? Get them while they're small. There's no, you know, there's no need to pour gasoline into the ground. Thank you for saying that. That is the number one recommendation I hear from people. Please don't do that. And if you have a huge nest and it's not really somewhere that's getting a lot of traffic, you might be putting yourself in greater danger by trying to kill the wasps than if you just wait until we got.

a good hard freeze and they died. Right. You know, this, of course, like, people should not endanger themselves or their pets or whatever,

but just because there's ground nesting wasp there, they don't need to die. A lot of times they're doing something beneficial. Yeah, there's, you know, you're going to do a much more disservice to your environment by polluting it with gas.

gasoline and pesticides that are leaching and then being part of the supply chain, then yellow jackets killing a couple of your individual honeybees and, you know, bothering you, right? Well, the other thing, just for the beekeepers out there, your bees at the end of the year are pushing out, they're even pulling pupa of drones, and they're pushing them out on the landing boards early in the morning. I recommend getting up at sunrise and going to see what's taking those away. And you'll find wastes who are taking those away. Well, those are cats offs anyway. They were going to discard them. They're just, you know, the cleanup crew. So I don't see that as a big deal. But I am glad you mentioned, you know, we don't want to

put gasoline in the ground. And definitely don't light it for those of you who love to recommend that. Also, it persists in the soil for a long time. And if I'm on a well, I don't want it in my ground. So I'm glad you touched on that. Go ahead. Oh, just the other thing to say about fire, too, is people love to burn bald-faced hornet nests or caterpillar, you know, webbing nests or whatever. Don't burn nests that are up in trees. Like, you'll like to do more damage to the tree with fire than the caterpillars or the wasps do. It's just don't ever use fire for pest control, but, you know, you're doing more damage to whatever is around it than you are getting control. So now, Kate said soapy water to defeat the cuticle and get those sphericals grounding them out, right?

What's your recommendation, Michael? If they had a nest, they have to get rid of it. Soapy water works well. I guess I have recommended wasp and hornet spray in some situations. Like everything else, it is situational. In most cases, I try to leave nests. If I can't leave the nest, I will try to take it out with. some non-chemical mean. If it's a paper wasp nest and I can just knock it down with like a

yardstick, I'll go for that. If I can hit it with the hose, I'll do that. If it's a bigger nest and I can get, say, a trash bag around it at night, I'll put a trash bag around, knock it into the bag, tie it up. The wasps can't get out. You're great. If it's something though, like a yellow jacket nest where I've got to dig it up at night and the act of digging it up has stirred those yellow jackets up. I'll usually spray it with wasp and hornet spray because it's got such a fast knockdown. The negatives of the insecticide spray, which you try to limit use as little as possible so you don't contaminate, try to hit the nest with it directly so you're not getting it into the soil. The negatives are outweighed by the benefits of not being stung. So, you know, I think

there is a place for it, but I think you need to be sparing in its use and trying to use, like, it's the basics of integrated pest management. Use everything, like, that is the last step that you use when there is nothing else. Yeah. Yeah, that works in that situation. So I think it has a role, but I think people definitely overuse it. And I don't want to give the idea of you've got permission to use it so you should use it all the time. Like that's, you know, there is a time and it is not every time in place. Great advice. Great advice.

So when we're looking at it, because a lot of people will be discovering these in-ground yellow jacket nest this time of year, how near to the entrance is the main nest? Like, are they just right in there? Is there a series of little cubby holes underground? how far away? Are there multiple entrances? Generally, what is the architecture there? I think it's pretty varied. So, you know, I think that the wasps like to find a cavity that already exists and they'll expand it and it depends on their population size. But I think the shape underground varies depending on both their population and probably your landscape. I know that where I live,

that if I want to dig a hole, I get a pry bar and I pry a boulder out of the ground. So I imagine that the yellow jacket mess are going to be shaped in a way that it's not going to be perfectly oval or round. It's going to be, you know, around the various rocks under the ground. So there'll be a lot of variation. And they usually have a second entrance that I've noticed. And they're very good excavators because I've watched them coming out with, you know, holding bits of dirt and stuff in their mandibles just flying away rapidly. How quickly could they, like some people, if you just dumped a pile of dirt on it, how quickly would they re-excavate and just be out again? Hours. Just hours.

Within a day, it's the latest. Yeah. So that's doing nothing. Other people recommend hot water. Some people say put dry ice on it. for those who just happen to have a bunch of dry ice around, which I never have, but do you know anything about why that works or if it does?

Well, that, you know, it's CO2, so that is going to work in the same way that it works for honeybees, that it makes them pass out unconscious. But then you'd have to get them before that wears off. Right. I mean, I guess if you think you can actually, appreciably freeze all of their brood and freeze them hard enough to die, but I'm going to call that is not that likely.

Yeah, you'd rather liquid nitrogen over that, right? You would want to hit them with some liquid nitrogen. Even that would take a lot of liquid nitrogen because you'd have to fill the whole cavity and the, you know, the ground would, you know, transfer a lot of energy into that liquid nitrogen. So I think, I mean, it would take a lot of liquid nitrogen to freeze that large of an area. So this is really good, Kate, because we're saving people a lot of money, those who have gone to the ice cream supply places and want to buy a block of, we're answering these questions so that people know that the cheapest solution is often the best. And so what else can we talk about? Michael, has there been a species presented to you that you did not know?

Have you found something new when someone submitted for identification? Do you have something named after you? So not through, I have not gotten anything that is new through the ID lab. But historically, classically, I'm trained as a taxonomist. I did my master's work on this group of mites that live in forest leaf litter called Cuneaxity. They're generalist predators that run around and eat whatever tiny mites they can overpower. I got between 30 and 35 species that I found in Arkansas, of those only five had been described. So like there was, you know, I had my work kind of, I didn't describe everything that was new because I ran out of time during my

degree. I described what I could and kind of moved on with life and there's probably 20 species that I know of sitting on slides undescribed because there are only three other people that are experts in Cunexity worldwide and I'm one of them and I don't work on them anymore. So you know your degree and they just walked away from potentially having mites named after you. So yes, because there are no jobs for mite taxonomists out there. Nobody wants to pay me. That said, I have two species named after me. One's a cunexid that a guy...

Can you spell a quinaxed? I'm sorry. C-U-N-A-X-E. There's a guy in Russia that named one after me, a cunexid. And there was a water mite that a buddy of mine at University of Arkansas named after me because I found this, I collected the specimens for him that he described that species off of. So it actually came out of a stream here in Pennsylvania. So where do you collect a water mite? Are they in the sedentary or then the humus at the bottom somewhere?

And how did you go about collecting them? It depends. Yeah, it depends on the species. There's Lodic and Lentic, so flowing water in still. water species. My buddy Ray, who was doing the work, was working on mites that live in ripples in streams. So you go to a riffle, put your net kind of in the substrate and then go upstream of it. Wait a second.

Yeah. A riffle. Kay, do you know that term? A riffle? I need to know what a raffle is. Tell us what a raffle is, Michael. Yeah. So, oh gosh, this is getting into.

stuff that I'm not super familiar with. In streams, you have runs, raffles, pools, and glides. And raffles are the part where you've got a lot of water flowing over an area that's kind of rocky. So you get like a lot of, you know, kind of turbulence right there. Pools are big pools. Runs and glides, I don't remember. So you go to a part of a stream where you get a rocky area. It's kind of shallow. Lots of turbulent water moving over it. Put your net in the water.

Go upstream of it and dig into the substrate with a shovel. And the mites are down in the rocks, in the substrate. They're not suspended in the water. But when you dig in there with a shovel, you suspend them in the water. They flow down into your net. You take everything that's collected in that net, dump it in. into, we used photograph development trays because they're the right size and nice and plastic and hard to break. Put him in there and then after an hour or two, the mites crawl out of the

substrate and you can pick them out of the water from like the edges of the tray. So I grew up outside of Pittsburgh. I was here visiting family over the summer. Ray was doing this watermite project. He had stuff all from the Ozarks where we were. and I said, just give me a net. I'll grab some stuff when I go home to get you some more like samples that you don't get. And I got a whole bunch of species that he didn't find out in the Ozarks because I was just happened to be here visiting and took a day to go sample. So he named one of those after me. That sounds outstanding.

So what's it named? What's it called? Torrentica, Escobarla. I thought, I knew that's what you were going to say even before he said it. knew that that was it. Okay. So we're going to have to wrap this up, you guys. And I want you each to describe a behavior you've seen in an animal. And I need to know something that blew your mind a little bit was just phenomenal. Some behavior that it was doing, some way that it was surviving that really impressed you and stuck. Do you have anything? Just right at the top of your

head. Well, back to wasps, you know, I don't know how long ago it was that I learned that the adult wasps will feed the

larva who have teeth, but the larvae ask to be fed by scraping their fangs on the side of the comb? Yeah. And the adults then are rewarded because the larva will feed them back some delicious treat.

They partially digested, which incentivizes the adults to forage for the young because they're also rewarded for their effort. That is not a nice sound, by the way. That scratching sound that they make when there's a whole bunch of them, not an ASMR candidate at all. But that's a great story. You're right. That is an amazing behavior. Michael, what have you come up with? So I think the one that I'm most intrigued with right now, I'm working.

Some of the research I'm doing is on deer keds. So if people haven't heard of them, they're these biting flies that get on deer, but they bite people. So that's a problem. And so we've been doing some work on them trying to figure out if they're blood feeders. We want to know if they're pathogen vectors. they fly to a host a deer typically and they shed their wings and they crawl through the fur like a tick in blood feed but they're flies and the neat thing about these deer keds is that unlike many other insects where you know most insects lay a lot of eggs very few of those eggs make it through to development into adults so monarch butterflies for a good example you know one in a hundred eggs survives to adulthood

mother kids are really good mothers. So she keeps one egg internally. That egg hatches. She keeps the larvae inside of her internal in a kind of fly uterus. And they have internal development. It goes through all three larval life stages inside mom. She secretes a special milk that she feeds it. And then right as it is ready to turn into a pupa, she larvae pot. She doesn't ovapause it because it's not an egg. It's a larvae. She larvapods is this larva. It turns into a pupa and kind of rolls out of the hair of the deer and off into the leaf litter.

And so they have a really slow development. You know, they can pop one larva out a month. And so this makes the kids really long lived. They can live at least a year because we'll find them on deer up to a year later. and then more kids come out. And so we don't know if they live more than a year. They might live two, three, four years if they can survive being groomed out by the deer. But they're, you know, it's weird to see insects that have this kind of internal larval development with like a insect uterus and insect milk.

And so I think that's really cool because it's not something most other insects do. And I'm thinking about the amount of work it takes to figure that. out that this is what's going on. I mean, so they shed the wings. So they're committed to that animal host forever? Pretty much. They can transfer hosts with close contact. So does feeding fauns during mating.

They'll get on hunters that have harvested a deer and like dragging it out of the woods or butchers that are butchering deer. But it's got to be close contact. They have to crawl onto the other host. How big is it? So if a hunter's out there and they feel something crawling on them, the size of a pinhead, how big is this thing? Size of a tick.

They're fairly sizable. You can feel them crawling on you. I've got them in my hair. It's gross feeling. So you felt them crawling on you. Oh, yeah. Okay. The way we collect them is to go to deer processors and pick them off hunter harvested deer,

which means we're like kneeling around dead deer all day and they just crawl up you. And so I'll be driving home and like feel scurrying. in my hair and it is unnerving to say. Yeah, you need to go through a delousing process when you get home or something. What is your, wait, what does your wife do when you come back? Does she meet you in the yard and hose you down? I mean, what? Oh, no, she makes me go to a shower, though.

Okay. They're big enough, though. You can feel them and so you know if you've got one on you. That is a great story. I'm so glad you shared that, the feeling of it crawling on you. It is very, very interesting. And I have to say that this is something I'm trying to get video of. So I want to get a muddobber, flask, and a spider web,

because I watched one, land on a spider web, nab the spider, and fly away with it. I need a video of that. And what is it about the muddobber that gives it the ability? And they also favor the two-dimensional nests over the like funnels shaped little three-dimensional. mention this. Can you tell us more about that? Because I've also cut away their little mud things that seem crab spiders all piled up in there. It's like Halloween,

but Christmas at the same time. Because you don't know what's going to be in there. Because there's a number of kinds of muddobbers. Yeah. And sometimes it's one. big spider and then sometimes it's a pile of little spiders. Yeah, it is. I can at least do that, but I want this behavior.

What is it that, why is that muddabber was like that, Michael? Why are they going after spiders or why can they? Yeah, why are they spider specialists? What is, they go out of other things too, but it's this web thing that they can't get caught in the web. Is there critical so slippery? What's going on with them? I don't know.

Different muddawbers are specialized on different things. Some of them go after caterpillars. Many go after spiders. My guess is that partially it's a learned behavior because you'll crack open nests from the same species and there will be different spiders. So insects can learn and they'll specialize on a certain spider if they can find it

if it's common in the environment. So they learn how to navigate the nest. I do wonder if they can figure out in any spider web, they've got sticky strands and non-sticky strands, because the spider, you know, if it touches it sticky strands, it will get caught too. So I wonder if they can figure out which ones are the non-sticky strands and just walk on those two. Wow, I hadn't even thought of that. I'd have to look into it. That does seem like somebody would have investigated, though, because that is a cool behavior. So I wonder if somebody's looked into it.

Okay. We just have to set up a whole bunch of Raspberry Pi cameras continuously recording until there's action. Until it happens, yeah. And then I need to get a grant for a student to write a computer program to analyze it. That's where AI is going to help us identify where they're going and what they're doing. And I just forgot what I was going to say, darn it. Oh, yeah, the Juro spider. What do we know?

Probably not going to be a big deal. Unless you're afraid of spiders. Unless, so, yes. So Joros spiders are going to be the biggest spider in our area, at least the biggest web building spider in our area. That said, we've got a congeneric, so a species that's related in the same genus that lives down in Florida in the southeast.

people down there, you know, they've had them there for 100 plus years, 200 years. We're not entirely sure if they're native to Florida or not this native, this code unquote native species. They've been there as long as Europeans have been looking, but it might be that they blew in. Anyway, people down there just live with them. Like, these giant spiders don't get out of their webs. They don't chase you down. They're big orb weavers. And down there, people don't know.

even give them a second glance. And so... Well, I was told that the, that the web material is very strong. It's like five test monofilament fishing line or something. Yeah, it's really strong. But, you know, once people here get used to it, it might be a nuisance if they build a web in a place you don't want them. But people are going to get used to it the way that people down in Florida are used to the golden orb weavers. We don't know how they're going to impact native insects. Obviously, they'll be catching insects and eating them. I guess it'll depend on how prevalent they are in the environment. I think my biggest concern is out competing the Golden Silk Orb Weavers down in the

Southeast where they co-occur because, one, they might hybridize, and so you've got issues with... Those spiders can hybridize? They might. They're the same genus. They might be able to hybridize. So you might have issues with, you know, Jorosbiter. genetics polluting the native species.

They also might just straight out out compete them, which is bad. So I think my biggest concerns are for the natives congeneric species we have, not so much on effects to human populations because the bite's not medically important. Right.

They're big spiders. It's a fear factor. Yeah. Yeah. They did find a population in Maryland, which is much further north and much sooner than I was expecting. Almost certainly brought there via human mediated transport. When was that?

They found those, there was reports of that on I Naturalist last year. Okay. I haven't seen if there are new reports this year, but they're probably popping up now if they're there. And for those listening and watching, that don't understand what's just said, I Naturalist is an app that you can put on your phone and you can photograph a species, and people will get back to you pretty quickly and help you

identify what that is. So closing statements, I want to thank you both for joining me for this conversation today. I hope that beekeepers are getting a broader appreciation for what's going on in the environment around our apiaries and that we should not be just about the bees, but considering all the other wildlife and we don't necessarily have to kill it. We just need strong colonies. What closing statement do you have, Kate? if anything. Oh, well, I hope that people take the time to go out and check out the behaviors of some of these social wasps because a lot of the things that you love about your honeybees, the social

wasps are doing them and slightly different versions of them. And it's really fascinating to watch. Fantastic, Michael. I think my similar, you know, especially we vilify why. and other stinging insects. But really, most of the time they're not being pests. We don't like being stung. And there are times, you know, a wasp nests over a busy doorway. We need to eliminate it just to reduce the risk of stings. But 95% of the time, we can let them go. And they'll just go about doing their thing. And they're not going to be pests that sting us. So, you know, recognizing

when things are pests and when they're not, and realizing that most of the time, even things that can sting us aren't pests. I think that kind of change in worldview can be really helpful. Great. Excellent. Thank you both so much. And that wraps up another episode of interviews with experts. I want to thank you for watching on YouTube or listening to the podcast, The Way to Be. Please take a moment to visit the video description and learn more about my guest, Kate Anton, and Dr. Michael's, Varla. I'm Frederick Donne, and this has been The Way to Be.