Wasps are functionally the same as bees, we just hate them because they’re not as cute n can hurt you more than once without dying
Except they’re not because wasps don’t make honey, they aren’t pollinators, they’re completely different insects and serve a very different function.
Not sure where you’re getting that information from but it is not correct, as wasps are actually very important pollinators.
There are also 20,000 species of described bees and of those there are only a small handful that produce honey, and of those there are currently even less (off the top of my head I can only think of 4) species we can actually harvest any honey from.
Wasps are also pollinators, ever heard of fig wasps, there are a superfamily of wasps called Chalcidoidea and each different species of fig often has one or two very specific species of wasp needed to pollinate it.
There’s still this misconception that wasps aren’t great pollinators compared to bees but this isn’t true, wasps are just as ecologically important in pollination as bees are, and also pollinate flowering plants and trees. For example; thynnine wasps pollinate orchids like this dwarf hammer orchid.
This is super common in Australia where we have about 200 species of orchids (spider orchids, elbow orchids, flying duck orchids) that use male insects (most of which are wasp species) to pollinate.
Also most bee species can hurt you more than once without dying. Yes, honeybees have a barbed stinger and die after they sting, but not all bees are honeybees.
And, as our curator likes to say, evolutionarily speaking bees are basically just vegan wasps.
I’m so happy to see this new movement lauding the many virtues of wasps. I’ve had so many people ask me “what are they good for?” Like what the fuck are YOU good for Heather? Do you even know how many different kinds of wasps there are? Yes they’re important, dammit! An animal doesn’t become worthless just because you personally don’t like it! Your opinion means fuckall to the ecosystem! It doesn’t care!
Also there are thousands of species of parasitoid wasps that are significant predators of other insects and spiders, and the majority of those wasps can’t or won’t sting you anyways.
Just because it isn’t cute enough to make you happy doesn’t mean it’s bad.
This is a game. About ants. In which you basically manage resources to maintain the population. There will be disasters, migrations, predators, I don’t know what else.
And combats. With acids. Exploding ants. It will be messy.
Science wasn’t actually certain how fungi like cordyceps “hijacked” their host’s behavior, and we always kind of assumed it was causing some relatively simplistic damage to the brain, but now it seems the truth is much more like all the dramatized versions of it in sci-fi horror.
These fungi integrate themselves on the cellular level with the host’s tissues all throughout their body, actually seem to send signals to the host’s muscles and even alter the host’s genes with their own.
And all the while, it turns out THE BRAIN ISN’T TAKEN OVER AT ALL.
These fungi, all along, have been converting their hosts into animal-fungal hybrids they control while the host’s brain and consciousness remain helplessly alive and largely unaltered.
Class Insecta (Insects) Order Hymenoptera (Ants, Bees, Wasps and Sawflies) No Taxon (Aculeata – Ants, Bees and Stinging Wasps) No Taxon (Anthophila (Apoidea) – Bees) Family Halictidae (Sweat Bees) Subfamily Halictinae Tribe Halictini Genus Agapostemon (Metallic Green Bees) Numbers 14 spp. in 2 subgenera in our area, 44 spp. in 2 subgenera worldwide/total(1)
The real question here is “what is smart?” because rationalizing is something we as the human species invented in my opinion (what is “good” and what is “bad”). Anyhow, the question is still interesting, let’s look at the phylogenetic tree shall we:
Following the “if the clade is younger, the animals are more adapted/advanced”-argument, flies, butterflies and hymenoptera should be most “intelligent”. I think intelligence can be “measured” in cognitive behavior, and we know some examples of moths reacting to chemical cues. But this is not “real learning”.
Bees, bumblebees, wasps and ants are however capable of learning behavior. In nature, these animals live in colonies and are able to protect other individuals altruistically and care for larvae that are not even from their own. In addition, bees have developed the interesting “bee dance” in order to communicate about food-sources, and if I remember correctly, bees even learn the dance from other workers. Orchids even have some interesting co-evolution going on with inexperienced bees, indicating that bees can learn which flowers they can visit.
Bumble bee mimics have become a secondary fascination of mine as I study real bumble bees. These robber flies (Diptera: Asilidae) are fantastic mimics that go so far as to mimic color patterns of endemic species across their geographic distribution!
I wonder how many “bumblebees” I’ve seen have really been just very clever robber flies
PiraticOctopus 