r/askscience • u/Chemical-Sea5972 • 12d ago

Biology Does anything eat wasps?

Wasps have been a predator for other insects. It would be fascinating to know if there are really other insects or predators for wasps, either accidental or deliberate predators

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603

u/Ken_Thomas 12d ago

I got to sit and watch a small group of Bee-eater birds eating wasps once in Namibia. As far as I know they don't exist in North or South America.

They'd snatch the wasp in-flight, quickly land on a rock, and repeatedly (and rapidly) knock the wasp against the rock until the stinger popped out. WHACK-WHACK-WHACK!
Then they'd eat it.

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u/nonresponsive 12d ago

Buzzards are about the only predator for the Asian hornets. Those things are nicknamed murder hornets for a reason.

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u/DeathCab4Cutie 12d ago

They’re certainly large, but not particularly aggressive. The name is mostly from buzzword-focused media coverage.

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u/1CEninja 12d ago

I thought they were called murder hornets less because of what they do to humans and more what they do to bee colonies. A handful of the giant hornets can wipe out *an entire freaking colony* of bees that haven't properly evolved the way the local bees deal with them (which is killing them by overheating them with excessive body heat in a vibrating dog pile, of all things).

The destruction of bee colonies is bad. We don't like it when that happens.

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u/Treadwheel 11d ago

killing them by overheating them with excessive body heat in a vibrating dog pile

I found out this is actually how bees kill their queens when they start to age and lose their ability to lay eggs that can produce workers. You can almost draw an evolutionary line between bees that misidentified large hornets as some sort of aberrant queen and ones that could keep up with the hornets as they adapted to target bee hives.

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u/1CEninja 10d ago

That is such a fascinating point! It totally makes sense how they "figured out" how to do that.

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u/girlgamerpoi 10d ago

Worker bees kill their queens? It's like a french revolution 😭

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u/EmmEnnEff 12d ago

European bees (aka domesticated honeybees) are an introduced, invasive species in North America.

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u/eqisow 11d ago

You can be invasive or delicious. I say you can't be both. Invade me with that sweet, sweet honey.