Red-banded sand wasp
The red-banded sand wasp is a long, slim wasp with a super thin waist and an orange band on its black body. The mum is a hard-working hunter. She digs a burrow in the sand and fills it with a caterpillar for her baby.
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Fun facts
She closes the burrow with little stones and twigs and covers it with sand, so nobody can find it.
She mostly hunts on sunny days and stays quiet when it is cloudy.
Sometimes a sneaky mum steals another wasp's caterpillar, or swaps the egg in another nest for her own.
Building and filling a new nest takes about 10 hours, but swapping an egg takes only about 30 minutes.
Most asked questions about Red-banded sand wasp
?What does the red-banded sand wasp eat?
Its larvae eat the caterpillars their mum brings them.
?How big is the red-banded sand wasp?
It is about 15 to 25 millimetres long, quite big for a wasp.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Ammophila sabulosa
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Sphecidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Sphecidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia
Where the facts come from
- Ammophila sabulosa (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 Chiswick Chap. CC BY-SA 3.0, 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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