Wasp fight

[William H.]

I walked onto my balcony just to take a look outside and noticed a big fight going on at the paper wasp nest. There was one large wasp who was fighting three young
adults. At least several weeks ago some of the young at this nest had matured into young adults and I would normally see three or four of them tending
to the nest with the queen.

The fighting went on for a couple of hours, the young adults would flee the nest one by one, but they would return in ten minutes to fight some more.
Initially I thought a strange queen had arrived and was attempting to take over the nest, although that wouldn't account for the whereabouts of the original queen.

This first photo shows two of them fighting on the nest, the main contact seemed to be the furious rubbing
and hitting antenna to antenna, with the front legs also flailing some.

They did the antenna fighting for a while, then, as seen below, one of the young adults kept trying to sting the queen,
apparently unsuccessfully. I saw a lot of fighting, but I never once saw the queen try to sting one of the smaller wasps.

After fighting on the nest for three to five minutes, they would usually drop eight feet to the balcony, clinging to each other on the way down.
There the fighting would continue, sometimes in the cracks between the boards. In this next photo, the younger wasp is back on its heels,
at this point they had stopped fighting with their legs and continued with antennas only:

After another minute or two the young one had had enough, and crawled away from the queen.
It tried to fly but could only go a few inches, so it crawled up the wall and rested for at least an hour, seemingly exhausted:

Ever since the queen had young in her nest, she appeared to get easily agitated when I got near, so I haven't attempted any photos recently.
But with the fighting going on today, they were so focused on each other, that I felt comfortable getting just inches away to take these photos.
I took well over one hundred shots, in many of them they were moving much too fast to get a good picture.


The sun is now going down and just the queen is left, I'm now thinking that she has forced them from the nest, urging them to start their own families.
As you can see in a couple of the photos, there is still young to be raised, but perhaps she doesn't need help any more.

I noticed in this photo that similar to the cicada, the wasp might have three simple eyes located between its two larger ones.

I'll have to check tomorrow to see if they try to return.

 

[Luceiia]

The ocelli are three eyes situated between a bee's two larger compound eyes. The ocelli detect light, but can't focus or arrange an image like the larger compound eyes.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/alienempire/multimedia/bee.html (highlight the head, then magnify)

Great photos, thanks for sharing.


Luceiia

 

[garys_2k]

AWESOME! Thank you.

 

[Bikewer]

As we sit around and ponder the wonders of the universe and the complexities of the human condition, we sometimes forget the amazing things going on in our backyards!

 

[Humphreys]

Wow, those pictures are fantastic. Thanks for sharing them

 

[tamiO]

You really took some nice shots there. Thanks for sharing them.

 

[William H.]

The ocelli are three eyes situated between a bee's two larger compound eyes...

Thanks for the link, and thanks to others for their comments.

I checked first thing this morning and just the queen was on the nest and one of the young adults was hanging out on the wall about four feet away. But when I checked again after lunch, there were two young adults on the nest with the queen and everything was peaceful. This pretty much invalidated my theory so I did some research on the web and found this:

She then stops foraging, becomes the queen, and rules by dominating her offspring of workers. This is a classic dominance hierarchy with the queen maintaining control through aggressive interactions. Each individual in line maintains dominance over all others below her through confrontation and aggressive interactions.

at this link:

http://www.everythingabout.net/articles/biology/animals/arthropods/insects/wasps/paper_wasp/

So I guess it turns out she was just showing them who is the boss of the nest. Still, it was facinating to watch and I'm glad to have found the probable cause of the fighting.