This time of year, when yellow jackets invade a mountain picnic or backyard barbecue, it’s really hard to see the good in these insects and their relatives. But it’s there.
“When people think of wasps, they think of only a couple ones that really are bad actors,” said Dr. Jerry Freilich, High Desert Museum volunteer ecologist. “Dr. Jerry,” as he is known in the building, is an aquatic invertebrate specialist and Hymenoptera enthusiast — that’s the scientific order that includes bees, wasps, sawflies and ants (hornets are in there, too). His goal, nay mission in life, is to enlighten and expand the minds of any anti-Hymenopterist and draw them into the fascinating world of these insects.
Dr. Jerry is often asked by those who visit his mobile insect display in the Museum’s desertarium about yellow jackets, one of the most common spoilers of picnics and barbeques, but just one of the many wasps flying around a yard. “The only reason you don’t notice the other wasps in your backyard is because most don’t have any interest in hamburger meat,” Dr. Jerry explained.
But for the negative press that yellow jackets and bald-faced hornets get, there is an incredibly diverse and fascinating world of wasps and hornets out there. “The Vespidae or Vespids give a bad name to the whole group of wasps, of which there are numerous other families,” Dr. Jerry said.
Chris Helzer, The Prairie Ecologist blogger, sums up these fears by saying, “Dismissing all wasps because of a few aggressive ones is kind of like giving up on Mexican food because you don’t like cilantro.”
Worldwide, there are somewhere around 100,000 species of wasps and roughly 20,000 species of bees. Some wasps, like yellow jackets and paper wasps, are eusocial, meaning they build a nest with a queen and workers who will sting, and sting repeatedly, if their nest is threatened (side note: males don’t sting). Other wasps live a solitary lifestyle and rarely sting.
Wasps serve as pollinators and search for prey that they paralyze with their stingers and carry back to a nest for their developing larvae to eventually consume. The different transport methods — in the wasp’s jaws, clamped between the legs, attached to the stinger — are just as unique as the relationships between wasps and their prey.
At the Museum, I catch Dr. Jerry relating a story from his teaching days at the University of Georgia. “The students would go outside the building and sit and watch as an Oxybelus wasp (a type of spiny digger wasp) would fly to its ground nest with a small Dolichopodid fly attached to its stinger. The students would note the time and watch as the wasp would exit, then return within a few minutes with another fly again attached to the stinger. At the end of the session, we’d dig up one of the nests and count the number of paralyzed flies which would be around 25. Each fly had a single egg deposited across its neck and all the flies were male.” Macabre if it wasn’t so cool.
On a recent trip to the Steens, I was photographing wildflowers and found a brilliant looking common blue mud-dauber wasp (Chalybion californicum). This inch-long wasp, with the classic narrow “wasp waist,” is known to predate on spiders which it collects and lays within a single chamber of a mud-constructed nest built on the underside of a building or natural feature. The female lays her egg on the paralyzed spider, then seals the chamber in which the larvae grow, feeding on its host. And according to Bastiaan Drees and John Jackman, authors of A Field Guide to Common Texas Insects (Gulf Publishing, 1999), these spiders are of the black-widow variety!
So, keep an open mind and don’t let the annoying actions of yellow jackets detract from the fascinating ecological aspects of other wasps in your backyard. And catch Dr. Jerry at the High Desert Museum, he’s usually there twice a week, to learn more about these amazing creatures.
This article appears in the Source September 18, 2025.
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