Eastern cicada killer
It is black and reddish with pale yellow stripes and brownish wings. It hunts cicadas, the loud singing insects in the trees, to feed its babies.
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Fun facts
A cicada can weigh more than twice as much as the wasp. She sometimes climbs a tree first to get high enough to fly home with it.
The mother digs a tunnel in the ground 25 to 50 centimetres deep, pushing the soil out with her spiky back legs.
A baby girl wasp gets two or three cicadas to eat, but a baby boy gets only one, so the girls grow much bigger.
The boy wasps sometimes grab each other in the air and tumble around until one flies away.
It helps trees, because cicadas suck the juice of trees and the wasps keep their numbers down.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sphecius speciosus
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Bembicidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Bembicidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Cicada killer, Sand hornet
Where the facts come from
- Sphecius speciosus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Zzzeek. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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