Wax borer cocoon bee, belongs to the parasitic bee category, but its parasitic target is not bees, but bee farmers are deeply hated nest insects, can be said to be a rare, mutually beneficial foreign residents in the hive.
Recently, due to the lack of management, there have been more foreign residents such as ants, slugs, rat women, cockroaches and other foreign residents in individual bee colonies, which really made me clean up. However, among these alien residents, there is another unexpected existence - the wax borer cocoon bee.
Because just one, at first it was not noticed, it waved its hand to show the drive, after the drive it was away from the spleen for a while, but it only wandered in the empty space of the hive, and after a while it stayed in the lower frame beam, and then a series of spleen checks It stopped on it steadily, without moving, which attracted my attention, and the spleen was carefully observed.
At this look, I suddenly found that some eyes are familiar, I remembered that I had seen articles about wax borer parasitic bees on the Internet before, and then took photos and recorded them to share and communicate with several other bee friends, and verified online.
When I was still confused about whether it was a parasitic wasp and if it was another one, my beekeeper took a step faster than me, immediately pointed out that it was a wax borer cocoon bee, and bluntly said that I could see its tail needle and wing mole (black spots on its wings).
The following figure is a map of the morphological characteristics of the three parasitic wasps in the literature, which can be compared and identified.
According to the literature, the wax borer cocoon bee can lay eggs to parasitize nest worms that are 1-4 days old, and the parasitic nest worms will die before harming the bee colony, thus achieving the purpose of preventing and controlling nest worms.
In the process of communicating with bee friends, a bee friend said that before there were also found in the bee colony (coordinates Hangzhou, Zhejiang), the literature found was recorded in Renhuai, Guizhou, Changsha, Hunan, Zhejiang Hangzhou have seen the figure of wax borer cocoon bees, it can be seen that the distribution of wax borer cocoon bees should not be small, the probability is because the individual is small, the number is small, so it has not attracted attention.
I took a closer look at the corners of the hive afterwards, and there was only one of them.
This is also a rare thing, so it is specially recorded and shared with the majority of bee friends.
There is also a note here: the 3 species of parasitic bees in the picture above, only the latter two are parasitic bees that can control wax borers, and the first kind of Si's bee cocoon bee is a parasitic bee that specializes in endangering bees, and it is necessary to distinguish from the latter two, the most typical difference is that the Si's bee cocoon bee has a thin waist and a yellower color.
When encountering Si's bee cocoon bees, you should pay attention to killing, and when you encounter wax borer parasitic bees, you should worry about not killing by mistake.
Article source: Dr. Bee APP