2023-07-05 09:19:00
It may be bad for insects, but in our flowery nature garden we still see all kinds of surprises following a rain shower. The sand thorns have just not dried up, and are now catching up with their flowering. Soon the amber bees present themselves, small, fast bees that come to the flowers of the forest and marsh andoorn. The anthorn shield bugs are also present once more.
Honey bees, earth bumblebees, field bumblebees and tree bumblebees pass by, hoverflies hover near the bushes and above the grass. An excited pose zigzags past: a yellow-black dude with a broad body and a menacing mask on his upper back – a skull hoverfly.
Urn and masonry wasps live in holes in the wall, in a dead tree and in a bee hotel. That’s where parasitic wasps, golden wasps and mourning floaters come; that parasitize the species that do the work. I see beetle killers and spider killers. They carry paralyzed beetles and spiders. A spider killer, which I was able to identify with the help of an unfortunately unclear photo, was a carbon black masonry spider killer alias glasswing spider killer. It owes its first name to its black body and its second to its transparent wings.
Large supply of paralyzed feed
Spider killers don’t stab a spider to death, but paralyze their prey. Sometimes they bite through the eight spider legs, which makes the prey more manageable. The paralyzed victim is deposited in a hole, as food for its own offspring. An egg is laid on the paralyzed spider, a larva crawls out and immediately has a large supply within reach. Still alive and therefore fresh.
If the spider is large, it can be a difficult opponent to overcome, but usually the spider killer wins. Because the photo of my spider killer is bad, you can see the confrontation recorded by Meint Mulder between a wolf spider and a not entirely black spider killer: the wasp aka red black brush spider killer.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes regarding something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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