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Cerceris antipodes
About 15mm long; mostly black with a few strong yellow markings and bands; medium black antennae; bronze tinted and heavily veined wings;
Quite a few of these were gathering on both eucalyptus leaves and sometimes nearby shrubs.
Thanks to John La Salle and Juan Di Trani for guidance. Thanks to Dr Ken Walker for ID. These wasps are somewhat social living together in earth nests and having some division of function. They are part way developed to fully social bees. "C. antipodes is a species with considerable variation in oocyte development among females, and therefore nests represented a variety of apparent social types." "... a sphecid wasp that shares nests in contrast to the majority of sphecids where only one female occupies a nest. Nest sharing results from females remaining in their natal nests and females moving to already occupied nests" (Love it) http://bie.ala.org.au/species/urn:lsid:b...
I like the idea of cerceris Juan... social types... some were having a little party on one leaf but I don't think they were speaking French. Searching for an Aus one now.
Thank you very much John and Juan. I hadn't started searching for this because 40C means computer stays off :) Off to search crabronidae now... thanks again.
This is not in the family Vespidae (which contains the yellow jacket wasps). The shape of the pronotum (the transverse yellow bit at the front of the thorax) places this in the superfamily Apoidea - which includes the bees and sphecid wasps (Sphecidae and Crabronidae).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphecidae
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crabronidae...
I would guess that this is a crabronid.
Thanks for the suggestion Sanjay but this one is very different. We do have the German species you mentioned as an introduced member of our fauna but it is much bigger, has a very different head, no yellow markings on the eye margins and very different habit to these.
The German wasp is about 13mm (0.5 inch) long, and has typical wasp colours of black and yellow. It is very similar to the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), but seen head on, its face has three tiny black dots. German wasps also have black dots on their abdomen, while the common wasp's analogous markings are fused with the black rings above them, forming a different pattern.
Spotted on Dec 28, 2012
Submitted on Dec 30, 2012
+1
