Garden Pests and Diseases: Friend or Foe #2, 1 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
Okay - as promised, some more beneficial insects. Tonight, I have a few wasps. I already posted a picture of a yellowjacket with a piece of insect it had caught, but there are numerous kinds of predatory wasps. Here are two.

The first is a sphecid wasp from the family Sphecidae which contains a few kinds of predatory wasps that prey on various insects and spiders. One kind (I don't have a picture yet of this one) is sometimes called a spider hunter, because it specializes in grabbing spiders out of their webs. These will sometimes be put in little mud "pots" - giving them their other common name "mud daubers". These wasps have very long thin waists.

This is another common kind of sphecid wasp. This one digs a tunnel in the sand and provisions it with insects. Here is a common kind digging a tunnel in my garden.