The Garden Thyme Podcast
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The Garden Thyme Podcast
608 The Wanna-BEES, Waps with Maddie Potter.
Hey Listener,
In this month's episode, we’re chatting with Maddie Potter, UME Faculty Specialist for Entomology and Integrated Pest Management, all about WASPS!
How are they different from bees, what roles do they play in the environment and we play "Wasp Fact or Fiction".
We also have our :
- Native Plant of the Month: Virginia Mountain mint
- Bug of the Month: Cuckoo wasp
- and Monthly Garden Tips.
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The Garden Thyme Podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland Extension. Hosts are Mikaela Boley- Principal Agent Associate (Talbot County) for Horticulture; Rachel Rhodes- Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture (Queen Anne's County); and Emily Zobel- Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture (Dorchester County).
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Garden Thyme Podcast Transcript
S6:E08 Wasps with Maddie Potter
Aug 2025
Note: The Garden Thyme Podcast is produced for the ear and is designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Mikaela
Hello, listener. Welcome to the University of Maryland Extension presents the Garden Time podcast, where we talk about getting down and dirty in your garden. We're your hosts. I'm Mikaela.
Rachel
I'm Rachel.
Emily
And I'm Emily.
Mikaela
And in this month's episode, we're talking about WASPs with Maddie Potter, the University of Maryland extension, faculty specialist for Entomology and Integrated Pest Management. Welcome to the show, Maddie.
Maddie
Hi. Thank you for having me.
Mikaela
We love having you on. And we're pretty jazz about this topic because we feel like wasps are the unsung heroes of the garden spaces.
Maddie
For sure.
Rachel
I feel like we get so many comments and questions from our public trying to distinguish what's the difference between a bee or a wasp or yellow jacket, or hornet, that this is really a great topic for August.
Maddie
Right.
Mikaela
And a lot of fear. Anything that remotely resembles a wasp or bee, people don't want to even be close to it. They think it's going to come right for them.
Maddie
Yeah, that's understandable. I'm sure most of us have had some experience with an insect biting or stinging us. So a lot of us will try to avoid that. And so it's a natural reaction if we see something flying toward us that looks intimidating.
Emily
I've had multiple people send me pictures of wasps that have triggered their ring cameras. And they're like, is this an invasive wasp? And I was like, no, that's a European Hornet, or, Nope, that's a yellow jacket, or, Nope, that's a carpenter bee. It just got really close to your camera.
Mikaela
Oh, that's really funny. All right. Actually, one of our first questions for you is, how do we tell the difference between things like bees, wasps, yellow jackets, hornets? How do you distinguish them without getting too close?
Maddie
Yes, that is a great question. So I will start off by saying that it can be difficult. So don't be hard on yourself if you're having trouble distinguishing between even broadly bees and wasps and then the different wasps species that we have, especially because if we're trying to identify them while they're flying around, they can be pretty quick, so it's hard to really get a good look at them, which is why taking photos can help. Broadly, we think about the difference between bees and wasps. They are related, so they all belong to this group or order called Hymenoptera, which includes bees, wasps, sawflies, and ants. So they're all related in some way, right? But when it comes to our bees and our wasps, we can simply think of our wasps as the carnivores of this group, so carnivorous wasps, and our bees are typically the vegetarians of this group, right? So if we think back to millions of years ago when these types of insects evolved, our wasps were first, so they were the predacious ones, carnivorous, and from them evolved our bees that we know today. And so they evolved to be able to exploit floral resources like nectar and pollen.
And from there, the diversification of all the different flowering plants that exploded over time. Same thing happened with our bees that we know.
Rachel
That's really cool.
Maddie
Some general things is people will think of loss of having a more narrow waist than our bees, and sometimes this can be the case, right? We can see some loss with some really narrow and even elongated waist, or this is called the petiole that attaches the abdomen to the thorax. But there's always an exception to the world, right? We have some bees, too, that can have some pretty narrow ways and can look very similar to a wasp. So because there are so many different species out there, it's hard to denote certain physical characteristics to bees versus wasps. There's such a big diversity out there. But what can be helpful is learning what some of our common species look like, what some of our common wasps are for our area and what some of our common bees are. That can be really helpful.
Mikaela
Oh, that's a great tip, Maddie. Now, can you maybe help explain the difference on how these insects have behavior with one another? Because we talk about insects having colonies Some are solitary. So can you explain more about yellow jackets and hornets that may have a more colony situation?
Maddie
Yeah. So when we think of a colony for bees or wasps, you may think of our classic honey bee, right? That have those honeycombs and those hives. There are some wasps, as Mikaela was hinting at, that have what we call these social dynamics where they live in a colony. So it's not all wasps, wasps. Most of our wasps species are actually solitary, which means we just have one female wasps provisioning one nest versus living in a big colony. But some of our common social wasps that we can think of include things like our yellow jackets, our hornets, our paper wasps. So they create a colony and they're all living and working together. And so that's where we can have a lot of them in one place, right within their nest. Something We may have seen before are paper wasps nests. They're exposed paper combs, typically umbrella-shaped, hanging from a single stock that's attached to all different types of plant material or even building materials. Or they can be more of the protective type nests where the comb has this paper envelope on the outside. It may even have these really cool striations where we have differences in colors with this paper envelope on the outside because they're collecting all different types of wood pulp, the wasps, mushing it up to create this wood pulp to create their nest out of.
Those can look a little bit different. But over time, as these colonies develop, there can be Anywhere from a few to hundreds, if not thousands of individuals living in a nest or working with this nest at once. It's going to really depend on the species and what time of year it is.
Mikaela
Well, what's interesting is that those paper nests look so delicate or they seem so delicate, but they have to withstand rain, weather, all sorts of things out in the elements, and yet they're pretty sturdy. I mean, they stick around, right? It's crazy to think about them.
Maddie
They do.
Emily
Now, Maddie, you talked about them having a colony setting. How similar would these be to a honey bee colony or an ant colony or a termite colony?
Maddie
Yeah, that's a great question. So it's going to depend on the species, but typically, our social wasps are going to be less specialized with their different roles compared to, say, a honey bee colony, which has all these different distinct roles for their workers or their caretakers and so on. So our wasps will typically have a queen and then all the workers that are helping with the nest and gathering different materials.
Emily
Okay, but I'd assume probably like other hymenopter, the males are just there for reproduction then?
Maddie
Yes.
Emily
Or are they helping out in the colony as well?
Maddie
Yes, they're usually just there for reproduction. So typically a colony will have mostly females for quite some time, especially as they're getting established. It isn't until they're ready for that reproduction stage that we'll see some of those males there to help reproduce.
Rachel
All right, so we all know that I love some fun facts about every topic that we go and do, and I usually go down some type of rabbit hole about our topics. So the fun fact for WALFs is that we have 19 different species of yellow jackets in North America, and wolves are found on every single continent, excluding Antarctica. So if you don't like them, There's a place for you to visit.
Maddie
And what's really cool to go along that is a lot of people are familiar with our bald-face hornet, right? And they are actually a type of hornet. The only true hornet that we have in our area is the European hornet. Our bald-face hornet is actually a type of aerial yellow jacket. So belonging to that group of species or a number of species that Rachel just mentioned.
Mikaela
I actually really like the bald-face hornet. I I don't know why, but I think their nests are just magnificent.
Rachel
Oh, I mean, they're truly a work of art, right?
Mikaela
Right. I have one hanging in my office. I waited for winter, of course, but just architecturally, they're amazing.
Rachel
Yeah, I have one in my office, too, and it has a tulip poplar flower sticking out of part of the side of it. And I've had for a few years. I love finding them, but I usually try to pinpoint it and then go back in the winter and try to get it down.
Emily
I think it always amazes me how they're able to make something so intricate, and yet I can't manage to assemble and I be a bookshop someday. So animal instinct's for the win.
Rachel
So true.
Mikaela
And maybe Maddie can explain in a little bit more detail, why do wasps or hornets Why do they get more aggressive towards fall and towards the end of summer?
Rachel
That's a great question.
Maddie
Yeah. So usually they get pretty aggressive and come around more of our picnics and fallen fruit in our yard because their provisions are decreasing toward late fall. So that's when we might see them around more often is they're running out of nectar and floral resources sources that a lot of the adult wasps use as their primary food source. And so when they're low on flowering sources, they're going to come after any sugary substance that they can get their hands on. So that can be our outdoor picnic. It could be our apple fritter. We're going out to pick apples or pumpkin, right? They can be attacking our soda cans, going after any of our trash that might not be sealed fully. And so this is where they get desperate, so to speak, for different food and sugary substances.
Rachel
Now, you mentioned one keyword, like they're losing their nectar and their flour resources. Can you touch on the role that they play in our ecosystem?
Maddie
Yeah. No, for sure. So this is something that's a little bit more positive about our wasps, right? Is they play vital roles within our ecosystems. We may think of them as those annoying or aggressive type species, but most of them are really important when it comes to sustainable pest control. A lot of our wasps species are predacious at some life stage, especially the adults are gathering different prey sources, could be caterpillars, grasshoppers, spiders to feed their young with. Then we also have groups of wasps, known as paracetic wasps or paracetoids. They are attacking all different types of life stages of insects, depends on the species. They're developing either in or on a host, some insect, typically. And eventually it will affect that host, leading to some form of sustainable control of things, say, stink bugs. I did a lot of research on paracetic wasps that attacked the egg stage of the invasive brown marmorate stink bug. So this female wasp would find a brown marmorate stink bug egg mass, lay her eggs inside inside of the stink bug eggs, and so the immature wasps would develop, eat that immature stink bug inside the egg, and eventually emerge out of the egg as a new wasps.
So it sounds gruesome, but it's a really important form of biological control, as we call it, or sustainable pest control. Now, some other roles that wasps can play is, as you can imagine, when they are hunting and provisioning, they're helping with nutrient cycling and also decomposition. There are some species that may go after some decaying insect and animal material, so they're helping to get rid of any of that in our environments. And they're also themselves a really important source of food for other wildlife, like our birds. So thinking of them as a part of that food web.
Rachel
So to get off topic, are they stinging our birds and our other wildlife if they're being used as a food source?
Maddie
That is a good question. I don't know how common that is. I mean, that's part of their defensive system, right? That's why we get stung sometimes is because they're feeling threatened. So I'm sure it happens where they're stinging their attacker, right? It could be a bird or other. Yeah.
Rachel
And then another question. So do the males have stingers, or is it just the females? Or are they both able to sting?
Maddie
It's the females that have the stingers because it's The sting or the stinger has evolved from the oviposer, which is the eggling appendage for insects. So that's a little fun fact for you, especially for some of our more intimidating loss. It's not always easy to differentiate between a male and a female wasp, right? But when it comes to our intimidating large cicada killer wasps, the females are out there looking for dog day, annual cicadas to sting, to paralyze, and to drag back to her nest, her underground nest, to feed her young. And the males are there for mating, right? But they don't have a stinger. And so the males can come across as aggressive because they can be really territorial. They can mark out their section of a landscape and defend it from other males. If we come into that territory or space, they may get up in our face, but they don't have a stinger, so they can't sting us. So they might seem intimidating, but they're not going to sting us.
Rachel
So once their job is done, aren't they done?
Emily
Yes.
Maddie
Typically, the males will have a shorter lifespan, but it's really going to depend on the species.
Rachel
So Maddie, we've talked about the roles in the ecosystem, and we've talked about the differences, but are they truly pollinators, or are they omnivores, like we talked about before?
Maddie
Yes, that is a great question. So wasps can contribute to pollination. They're a part of our pollinator community. A lot of people will refer to them as accidental pollinators, because while the adults are getting that nectar from different floral resources, some of the pollen can stick to their body, and then they'll move pollen between plants that way, contributing to pollination. But there's more and more research coming out that shows that wasps can be efficient pollinators. I think at first we thought, Well, they're just accidental pollinators. It just sometimes happens and sticks to the hairs on their body. But there was an interesting study that showed that yellow jackets may be outperforming honeybees in some spaces for pollination. So that's quite interesting.
Rachel
That is really, really interesting, especially because it's the common thought process that, like you said, they're accidental pollinators, that they're not actually doing the role that honeybees do. So they are just as important, correct?
Maddie
Yes. And especially when it comes to having a more biodiverse environment, right? We think about our honey bee. That's just one of our species of bees in our area, and it's actually a non native. We have over 450 other native bee species. And then on top of that, we're talking about our wasps. We have close to a thousand wasps species here in Maryland alone. So thinking about all that diversity out there, we can imagine that some of these species are really good at helping with pollination. They've evolved with specific plants, native plants in our area, as well as some of those other roles we talked about, such as pest control, different paracetoids or paracetic wasps that evolved with specific hosts, and they've really honed this skill and behaviors in over time.
Mikaela
It's just tough because yellow jackets are a hard sell. They're not as charismatic as a lot of our bees are.
Maddie
Yes, that's true. They are one of our more aggressive wasps species. But when they are in more less populated areas, they're playing important roles. It's just when they are close to human activity, they're near our front door, they're near our playgrounds. That's the case where they do become a pest in a potential hazard and where we may need to take action, unfortunately.
Mikaela
So we know that one of the reasons people don't like wasps is that fear of being stung. But how does a wasp singer work?
Maddie
Yes, so that's a great question. So even though most of our wasps are not aggressive, they're not coming after us to sing us unless, of course, they're defending a social hype of some sort, or if we're swatting them or stepping on them accidentally, of course, they're going to defend themselves, right? And so a wasp singer is a little bit different than, say, a honey bee stinger we may be familiar with. Our honey bee stingers are barbed, and they can only sting once. When a honey bee stings us, the barbed sting goes into our skin, and it can't be pulled off out really easily. What ends up happening is the honey bee dies, unfortunately, and sometimes some of their insides can get ripped out, can be quite gruesome. But when it comes to our wasps, they have what we can call a smooth stinger versus the barbed stinger with our honey bees. And so because it's more smooth, it can come in and out multiple times. And so wasps can sting us multiple times, those more aggressive species.
Mikaela
So basically, their optimal pain mission humans.
Maddie
Right. But this has involved to defend them, right? There's a reason for it. It's not like they have been created and put here to attack humans, right? It was just any predator, so they needed some defense, especially the social loss who are defending entire colonies. If we had a bunch of people attacking us in our home, we would defend ourselves. So same concept when it comes to these social loss.
Mikaela
Very cool.
Maddie
Yeah, so we talk about our social wasps that can be defensive and can use their singer to defend their colony, and to defend themselves. And so what about our solitary wasps? The ones that aren't living in a colony, in in a social system. We just have an individual female provisioning one nest that she creates. So these solitary wasps are primarily using their stingers to immobilize their prey. So like we were talking about earlier with our cicada killer wasps, the females are using their stinger to sting cicadas, to paralyze them so they can carry them back to their nest to feed their young. There's other wasps that will specialize in paralyzing and bringing back spiders or grasshoppers or caterpillars. So there's a reason behind these wasps, even beyond defense, but also to help them gather food to feed their young.
Mikaela
I'm so glad you mentioned that, because likewise, the diger wasps or the mud wasps, they look so intimidating, and yet really all they do is pack their nests full of spiders for their young. Just very maternal, really.
Rachel
Yes, they're providing, right?
Maddie
Yeah, it's impressive because especially with these cicada killers that look really intimidating, they're strong females. They are carrying a cicada, which is about twice her body weight, and bringing it back to her nest. And she needs multiple cicadas to feed her young. So over her lifetime, I think we approximate that one female cicada killer loss will carry over 100 cicadas. So that's pretty impressive. That's a lot.
Rachel
That is a lot.
Mikaela
Because cicadas are huge.
Rachel
Yeah, they are. So Maddie, can you talk about how people can prevent them from building a nest on or around their roof or their porch or close to a light fixture? I think that's always the calls that we get as extension educators is, Hey, I have a boss nest, and it's hanging right beside the entrance to my garage.
Maddie
Right. That is a great question. I know this is something everyone wants an answer for, right? There isn't a single preventative tool that we can use or facilitate to stop loss from building nests on things like our doorways, our eves, or in our shed. They're really good at finding new spaces, right, for their nests, especially because of urbanization and the loss of natural habitat, generally. But there are some different things we can try to use, such as checking for different holes and openings in our homes and in our sheds. We can cock and screen vents, cracks in windows. Sometimes Sometimes painting eves in different building surfaces can make them more slick, and especially with our paper wasps, they don't really like those slick or more slippery surfaces to build their nests on. Early spring, we really want to start looking for any of the paper wasps or yellow jacket wasps nests that are present and catch them early on. They start to grow over time. So if we can catch that nest when it's in that smaller stage, fewer workers, then it can be easier and less dangerous to remove.
Mikaela
I think it's also worth mentioning, and Maddie, you can confirm this maybe or verify, that most of the social wasps that build those big intimidating nests, once we have a first frost or we get really into the winter, it kills that whole nest, and then you can remove it. I know most people don't want to wait that long, but they don't return to that nest year after year. It's not like they are perennial visitors. Is that correct?
Maddie
Correct, yes. So usually if someone is contacting us about a wass nest, they want to remove, especially late in the season, late summer, late fall, we usually try to tell people to wait it out because that first frost will typically kill the nest. But yeah, it can be hard to wait. So it just really depends on how bothersome it is, how aggressive they are being, and if we can wait till that frost.
Mikaela
Which is funny because even when it's dead of winter, I still approach frost nest as if there's something like hiding in there that's going to pop out and get me.
Rachel
I think we all do, right? Because you associate it with something that's going to pop out and get you.
Mikaela
It's a deep-seated fear. You spend so much time making sure you give it a wide birth. It feels silly to go and touch it.
Rachel
It's like you don't go into a dark basement. It's just one of those normal fears. You move your car if you're behind a tractor trailer with logs. Oh, my God.
Maddie
You're so funny.
Rachel
So Maddie, do you have any resources you could share to help our listeners.
Maddie
Yes. So especially when it comes to wasps nest removal, we want to be very careful and very cautious. So reference credible resources. We have a really great social wasps web page on our University of Maryland extension website. So if you type in University of Maryland extension social wasps, it should pop up. A lot of information on there. We also have a identification guide to help you recognize some of our common wasps in our area, but also some tips on helping to deter any wasps. It doesn't have to be just their nest, but also active wasps within our area, as well as safety measures when it comes to the removal. Of course, you have the option to hire a professional to help you because you never know what can happen, and especially if people have allergies. We want to be cautious of this, too. Some other One of the sources I would highly recommend, and I think Mikaela brought this up earlier, is the WASP book by Heather Home. I really like this book, especially if you do want to dive into the diverse world of loss. It's really eye I know I continuously learn about even just this group of WASPs more and more.
It's endless, especially if you get into learning about paracytic WASPs. We estimate there is a paracytic WASP species for almost every insect species out there. So that's pretty crazy to think about. So wasp look by Heather Holmes and also a Wasps: The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Insect by Eric Eaton. That's also a really great book to check out. And a podcast that interviewed Eric Eaton is called A Wildlife: A World of Wasps. So if you're into podcasts like you're listening now, I highly recommend checking this episode out.
Mikaela
Those are awesome. Yeah, Heather Home has some really great books. She also has a Native bee book. That's awesome.
Emily
Okay, Maddie, so do you have a favorite wasp?
Maddie
Oh, that is a great question. I think one of them would have to be the bercoded wasps that attacks tomato hornworms. That's a pretty cool life story that I think we all see in our gardens if we're growing tomatoes, right? But may not realize everything that goes on inside of that tomato horn worm and what those white cases are on the outside, which are actually the pupil cases of this paracetic wasp.
Emily
That's a good one. And I think that's one that most of us maybe don't ever see the wasp, but we see the signs of it in that we see that parasyzed horn worm.
Maddie
Yes. So the wasps themselves are super tiny, but once they find that tomato horn worm, laying eggs inside of it, and then the baby paracetic wasps, the larval stage, will push out of that caterpillar. They'll weave their silk and cocoons and finish their life stage and emerge. So quite a amazing life story.
Emily
Awesome. So that's it for the questions we had. Was there anything Is there anything else that you wanted to say about WASP, whether it's the stinging yellow jacket hornets or anything else, Maddie?
Maddie
So I don't know if we'll have time for this, but I had three WASP fact or fiction question for us. So for you all to comment on.
Mikaela
Yes.
Rachel
Well, I feel like Mikaela is going to win this because she's...
Maddie
There's no winning.
Mikaela
It's just facts. It's fun.
Rachel
There's always winning.
Mikaela
When we learn, we always win.
Emily
There we go. Says the person who always wins the games.
Rachel
Exactly.
Mikaela
All right, let's hear him, Maddie.
Maddie
So I have some wasp fact or fiction for you all. So I'm going to say a statement, and you have to guess if it is fact or fiction, and if you have any comments on it. So the first one is, hanging fake wasp nests can deter loss.
Rachel
I'm going to say fact.
Emily
I'm going to go, I think, with fact with this, because I've always put like, balloons up in the corners on my porch to keep them away, and it seems to work. So I imagine that might work. Although I don't know where you get a fake wasps nest from. What company manufactures fake wass nest?
Mikaela
Amazon. I had to look this one up. I think it's fiction.
Emily
Yes.
Maddie
So mainly fiction. There hasn't been any studies to show they're effective, and there have been companies that will produce fake wass nest that people can purchase.
Mikaela
They're like the paper lanterns. Like they collapse, I think.
Rachel
That's really cool.
Mikaela
I think they look neat.
Rachel
Is it like the Japanese beetle traps?
Emily
You just need to fill your entire porch with them, and then no wassness will come in.
Rachel
Because they don't have space.
Emily
Yeah, basically.
Maddie
The area is full. Yeah, I don't know. I've heard people comment on how we can still... In nature, we can find lost nests near one another. So I don't know how much of a deterrence it is to have one of those fake ones up because maybe it's not much of an intimidation factor.
Mikaela
It's a good theory, right? You'd think they'd be territorial.
Maddie
Okay, next one is, wasps can recognize human faces. Is it this fact or fiction?
Rachel
I'm going to say this is fiction.
Mikaela
I think it's fact. The giant Asian hornet can recognize faces.
Maddie
So it's a A little bit of both. I think the media had spun some recent research in a certain way because there has been research to show that certain paper wasps species has the ability to recognize individual faces of wasps in their colony. And this is different facial patterns that they're recognizing. And through that research, they've realized that the process that they're using is similar to humans, and it's called holistic face recognition. So they're using processes similar to humans to recognize wasps within their own colony, but not necessarily other humans. But I'm sure there's more research that needs to be done. There was a study that was done with honeybees where they were able to train them to recognize human faces. But of course, this doesn't happen naturally. This had to happen through a training system and process, right?
Mikaela
That is wild.
Rachel
That is insane.
Maddie
Okay, last one we have is the Northern giant hornet, also referred to as the murder hornet, can be found in Maryland. Is this fact or fiction?
Rachel
Fiction.
Emily
That's false.
Maddie
Yes, this is false. Was it ever here in Maryland?
Mikaela
No.
Maddie
Right, exactly. We have a lot of large wasps in our area, like European hornet and the cicada killer wasps that could look similar. But the Northern giant hornet, there hasn't been reports in Maryland. The only reported US state it was found in was Washington State, and they were able to eradicate it, and they reported that official eradication back in December of 2024.
Mikaela
Those are great facts, Maddie.
Rachel
Yeah, I love games like this, even though Mikaela always wins.
Mikaela
I do not.
Emily
Says the person who just won, again.
Mikaela
Who is keeping It was three questions.
Emily
It was very easy to keep count. Easy.
Rachel
Yeah.
Emily
Anyways, that was very fun, Maddie.
Maddie
Nice, nice. Yeah, no, a random thing about the eradication, I don't know if you guys heard, but Someone from AFAS came up to me at a recent event, and they used a tiny radio tag on one of the Northern giant hornets to trace it back to its nest. And that's how they were able to track down all the nests.
Emily
That is so cool.
Rachel
That's pretty smart.
Mikaela
That's like spy level.
Maddie
Yes. And there's photos of it. If you look up Northern giant hornet radio tag, it has a photo of one of those big hornets with a radio tag hanging off of it. I don't know if it's petiole or it's leg. It was really hard to see, but it's really interesting.
Mikaela
Well, now I'm looking it up. Oh, it's just like a little tag. That's crazy.
Rachel
Oh, my gosh. That's so smart. They air-tagged The call is coming from inside the building.
Mikaela
Man, A lot of movie references today.
Emily
I know. We're in a silly mood.
Mikaela
We are in a silly... It's the dog days of summer, I'm telling you. It makes you silly. It's serious in the sky. Well, thanks Thanks so much, Maddie. We really appreciate you coming on and sharing all your facts and wisdom so people are less scared of wasps.
Maddie
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. I know it's a tough sell, I will say. But I feel like with the different guidebooks and seeing all the different colors, shapes, and sizes they come in, it really opens people's eyes up to how diverse they can be and how there's a ton of different species in their garden that they may not even know or they're and Just flying around doing their thing. Absolutely. I feel like we let Yellow Jackets and Hornets give the rest of the group a bad rap. I agree.
Bird calls: It’s the Native Plant of the Month with Mikaela: bird calls:
Mikaela
You know I love to wax poetic about native plants for hours and hours.
Emily
I know.
Mikaela
All right. Very appropriately for this month for my native plant pick is Virginia mountain mint, or Pictnanthum virginiana. Now, this is considered a rare plant in Maryland, so there's no going out in the wild and collecting it or moving it or anything of that nature. But it is It's pretty prevalent across parts of the Eastern United States, and it's part of a group of plants in the mint family, which includes narrowleaf mountain mint, clustered mountain mint, and hoary mountain mint, all of which are also really great choices. Now, this is a branching, herbaceous perennial that grows to be about three feet tall with lots of clusters of small white to purplish flowers, and they peak right about this time, July and August. And the numerous purple dots on the bottom lip of the flower petals are used as a visual attractant for these insects, like a blinking lights, like, Come gamble your money here, right? It's calling Vegas. And the growth is very rhizomatous. So this means this plant spreads very easily to surrounding areas underground. They send out shoots and roots. In very fertile areas, this could lead to aggressive spreading and growth.
This is considered an aggressive plant, but I like to think of it as a manageable aggressive. You can always just pull up along the edges and keep it contained. No surprise here, when these leaves are crushed, they have a very pepper minty odor, much like the rest of the member of this family, the mint family, and a square stem. This is all characteristic of the Lamey sea family. Here's a shout out to our spring episode that was on mint. We also use this plant in full sun, full to partial sun, with moist to average soils. It can grow pretty well in mini soil types from sandy to loam or clay soils. It's pretty tolerant. You may see more growth and vigor in more fertile soils, and it may be a little bit smaller or less prolific in low fertility. Why is this the pick of the month? Well, because this is considered one of the top plants, according to Heather Holm, who literally wrote the book on wasps, for attracting a variety of predatory wasps and parisotoid species. This includes typhid wasps, diggers, bee wolves, potter, and grass-curing wasps, not to mention all the other bees and pollinators that enjoy visiting.
It doesn't serve just one group of insects. It serves a very broad group of insects. But if you want to attract high quality predatory insects and bees and support these kinds of insects, this is a plant you should have. And if not this particular species, you can try one of the other ones I to mention. Narrowleaf mountain mint is actually one of my favorites because it has a very fine leaf texture that I think looks really nice in a landscape. And that's my pick of the month.
Rachel
I love this pick of the month. I think there's nothing better than to sit there and watch mountain mint and see all of the pollinators that love it. You could spend hours just sitting there and watching and IDing insects. It's a great pick.
Mikaela
Yeah, I just have countless videos of just all the insect activity. And it's not just a bee or just several bees. It's all kinds of insects. It's just a magnet.
Emily
I think what I like about this one, too, is this one has those really cute little tiny white flowers, but they've got a little tiny hint of pinkishness to them. So it's super pretty. And to have all the bees and everything flying around it. Perfect.
Mikaela
And what's interesting is some of the leaves towards the top, nearer to the flowers, have a silvery color or appearance to them. So their color looks very minty, broadly enough. And so It has a really beautiful color that's nice in the garden.
Emily
It's a short Bug of the Month because while this is the super cool bug, we don't actually know a lot about my Bug of the Month this month. And that's probably because it's hard to study because it's paracetic, and it's paracetic on other wasps. So to study it, you'd have to break open the wasps nest. And I don't think people want to do that to study it.
Mikaela
That's fair.
: Buzzing: It’s the Bug of the Month with Emily: Buzzing:
Emily
Yeah, it's fair. This month's Bug of the Month is a group of wasps called cuckoo wasps or Paracetic Yellow Jackets. Now, just like the name implies with cuckoo, this is a wasp that doesn't necessarily paracetize an insect in that it lays its young inside of them and then it eats the internal organs or anything like that. But instead, it does exactly what the cuckoo bird does, and it infiltrates in and then convinces the other wasp to help it rear out its young. We do have a known species here in Maryland, and I'm going to attempt to say this. It's the Dallakuvespa poula artica. It doesn't have a common name, but that's its scientific name. There are several species also across North America and in Europe. These guys are going to be socially parasitic of other yellow jacket species. They're not necessarily individually host-specific as much as genus or common ones. They're known to parasize one or two species that look similar to, but not every single type of yellow jacket, if that makes sense. So unlike these other species that are eusocial, these ones don't have a working caste system in them. Instead, the female is going to invade a young colony of the host.
It's either going to kill the queen, or in some cases, it will serve next to the queen and eventually outcompete her and convince her workers to kill her. Very Game of Thrones. And it will basically assume egg laying duties. So instead of having a queen of their same species producing young that the workers would care for, it then takes the queen's place and only rears out its eggs and its species. So it will produce both male and females for its next generation. Those young will pupate within this other host's nest, and then they'll eventually leave the colony. They won't continue to serve as workers. So when this happens, the colony continues as long as the old worker is live. The adult males of the species found in Maryland here are black with an ivory color scheme, so they resemble black jackets or bald-face hornets. It's really hard to tell them apart if you're just catching them out of the corner of your eye. But if you happen to get a chance to really look at one or a photo of one, they typically have a pale-colored hind tibia, which is a part of their leg, while the bald-face hornets have all dark-colored legs.
And the black yellow jackets have all pale legs. So in order to tell the difference between them, you would have to look for a lot more finite detail. So you'd probably need to euthanize the wasps and then look at them underneath like a dissecting microscope. The females have more extensive white markings than the other ones. But again, they'd be hard to identify just flying around in your garden. You typically can find these active July through August here in Maryland, and we have known records of them being found out in Western Maryland, but not here on the Eastern shore. And again, because they have this interesting cuckoo paracetism-like habit, we don't actually know a lot about them and their behaviors, how they go about doing the infiltration and the spying and all that. But still, nonetheless, a very cool wasp that I felt like we needed to highlight on this month's Bug of the Month.
Rachel
That's a great wasp, Emily.
Emily
I wanted a cool bug.
Rachel
You always I like cool bugs, though.
Emily
I mean, is there such a thing as a non-cool bug, though? I feel like I have the easiest job out of the three of us because I'm like, I could literally put every bug on a wheel and spin it, and I'd be like, This is a cool bug. Why? Because it's a bug.
Mikaela
That's a good point, Nicole. That's hard to argue with.
Rachel
I feel that way about Mikaela's plants, too. I'm always like, Oh, that's a good one.
Emily
Yeah.
: Music: Get you Garden Tips Here with Rachel: Music:
Rachel
Just like our August gardens, we are hot, we are tired, and we have all but given up. But keep on keeping on. Keep watering, keep weeding, Keep observing for insect and disease pressure. If you have to mow your lawn, please avoid doing this during the hot and dry weather. Mowing actually can our grass blades, and it creates more surface area for plant moisture to escape. So it's actually going to cause your grass to dry out faster. So just let it be during August. And then start mowing again when your plant actually needs it. If you have planted anything from the spring, like trees or perennial plants or even a vegetable garden, continue to water those. In the ideal situation, You should let water soak and surround the root ball. When you're hand-watering, wet the soil around the plant base. Overhead watering will encourage plant disease, and Sometimes it does have a benefit to help cool plants and provide moisture for beneficial insects and spiders during our hot, dry weather. But we usually encourage watering at the base and then offering a water for your insects, like a little water bath or plate or saucer that you can put water in with a couple of stones, and then you empty that water every few days to give them fresh, clean water and to not encourage mosquitoes.
Allow the foliage of your plants to dry thoroughly after watering, and we want to water in the morning when possible. Disease problems are more likely to start If you're watering at night when our temperatures can go a little bit cooler, and then when you have a wet leaf surface, it just encourages disease behavior in our plants. If you have any diseased or insect infested plant material, you want to remove these. These do not go in your compost bin. They go in a black trash bag, and you need to dispose of them off of your property. If you put them in your compost bin, you're just going to perpetuate the problem of that disease or that insect infestation. If you still have tomatoes coming on right now, you can pick them when they first start to change color, and then they can ripen on your kitchen counter. You don't have to wait for that fruit to become red on the vine. If you have any herbs that you've planted in the garden, like thyme, rosemary, chives, basil, it's a great time to dry those herbs and preserve them for the winter. And we have some really great websites on our Family and Consumer Sciences page on drying herbs.
Get ready for your fall garden by planting your spinach, lettuce, carrots, even beets, and broccoli. Keep those seedlings moist and mulched. If you have time and you want to go out the August heat. It's a wonderful time to tidy up your garden by disposing up any rotted or dropped fruit in your garden or removing any folage to reduce disease or insects for next season. I also like to order my garlic and onions, even shallots now for fall planting, if you want to plant those in the fall. And this is a plug for fall bulb planting. It's time to order any of for the fall, like daffodils, crocus, or hyacin. It's also the perfect time to see which of our native plant nurseries are having native plant sales, because fall is the best time to plant our native plants, and any trees or shrubs. That's all the tips that I have for this month, listener. I hope that you're not getting too hot.
: Up Beat Music:
Rachel
Well, that's all we have for this episode, listener. We hope you enjoy it, and we'll tune in next month for more gardening tips. If you have any garden related questions, please email us at umegardenPodcast@gmail.
Com, or look us up on Facebook at GardenTimePodcast. That's Garden, T-H-Y-M-E. For more information about the University University of Maryland extension and these topics, please check out the University of Maryland extension Home and Garden Information website at go. Umd. Edu/hgic. Thanks for listening and having fun getting down and dirty in your garden.
Emily
Goodbye. Bye.
Mikaela
The Garden Time podcast is brought to you by the University of Maryland extension.
Emily
Mikaela Boli, Principal Agent Associate, Talbot County for Horticulture.
Mikaela
Rachel Rhoads, Senior Agent Associate for Horticulture in Queens, Anne's County. And Emily Zobel, Senior Agent Associate for Agriculture in Dorchester County.
Emily
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