#vespidae

I often feel like a forager wasp when I'm buying dairy for my family

male paper wasps are famously huge wimps but no individual i've ever encountered captures their essence quite as much as this one pathetically clinging to a plant like a crying baby while looking at me with his huge pleading green eyes after i interrupted his early evening nap

some female bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata) joined a friend and I this morning while out exploring. It was really incredible to see them in action!

a gentle giant trying to catch some z's on the garden bed last year. she's an Australian 'Hornet' (not a true hornet), and is the largest species of wasp in the country, with a 30mm body length!

it was fascinating to watch her, at first I thought she was injured or dying, as I've never witnessed a wasp sleeping like this before. every now and then a little ant would come along and disturb her, so she'd get up, walk around and find her comfy spot again, and lay back down.

Potter Wasps work so hard, flying back and forth all day with mud and provisions to build nests for their babies. it's nice to know they stop to relax sometimes too.

Northern paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) have been found to process the faces of other wasps as a whole, rather than just a collection of individual parts. This is called holistic processing, and it's the same way humans typically process each other's faces. This has been tested in a couple of other Polistes species and they did not process faces in the same way. This is very cool for Northern paper wasps! But crucially, processing each others' faces this way does not mean they process human faces the same. Recognising one another aids them due to their specific social dynamics, but recognising humans wouldn't present the same evolutionary pressures. In one study, their holistic processsing didn't even extend to another paper wasp species, but recognition of human faces has not been tested in paper wasps so we can't say one way or the other even if it looks unlikely

However, it has been tested in other species! Common yellowjackets (Vespula vulgaris) and Western honeybees (Apis mellifera) were capable of discriminating between human faces (although they had to be taught to do so as they probably don't do so naturally) and it seems they also have some capacity for holistic processing. Nevertheless, I feel like I see paper wasps brought up more often than yellowjackets when this fact comes up

There's a lot that still needs studying on this topic, and what we do have points to some really interesting hymenopteran abilities that are not found in many other animals, but it does frustrate me seeing these things exaggerated and overgeneralised to all wasps/Hymenoptera and then presented as facts when there simply isn't evidence for that yet. I love wasps and I typically see this brought up to endear people to them, which I respect, but spreading misinformation for a 'good cause' is still unhelpful

References

Tibbetts et al. (2021) 'Individual recognition is associated with holistic face processing in Polistes paper wasps in a species-specific way'

Sheehan and Tibbetts (2011) 'Specialized Face Learning Is Associated with Individual Recognition in Paper Wasps'

Avarguès-Weber et al. (2017) 'Recognition of human face images by the free flying wasp Vespula vulgaris'

Dyer, Neumeyer and Chittka (2005) 'Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human faces'

Northern Paper Wasp (Polistes fuscatus), family Vespidae, Acadia National Park, ME, USA