I just started reading ‘The Little Book of Bees,’ by Karl Weiss and C.H. Vergara (2002) - a wonderful read, unputdownable, like science-flavoured crack. A couple of chapters in, I discovered that we share our planet with an item called a ‘bee wolf.’
Not a bee wolf, that is.
But a bee wolf!
That’s a Philanthus triangulum, which ‘attacks bees busy collecting and anesthetizes them with one sting. This hunter then carries her prey under her body into a brood chamber at the end of a tunnel about 40 cm deep in the ground. Once she has collected three to six paralyzed bees there, she lays her egg on them and closes the tunnel to the chamber. The hatched larva nourishes itself on the muscles of the live, preserved bees.’
It occurs to me that ‘bee wolf’ is a fairly inaccurate nickname for this parasitic wasp. I mean, for one thing, it’s solitary; and secondly, whoever heard of a wolf being so sadistic that it broke its prey’s back and dragged it back to the cave so it could lie staring at all the other paralyzed prey in there until the end came? Yecchh. Nature gives me the shivers - and not in a good way.
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