Winged Assassins

Yesterday I built some shelving in the housekeeper's storage room, then fitted an offcut of lino, sealed it in around the edges and gave everything a good lick of paint. Massive improvement, they best thank me for it when the hotel reopens. Today I went in to topcoat the shelving and found a queen wasp busily surveying an area above the shelf. My options were to pot it up and relocate it a couple of hundred metres away, or smash it with the 2" paintbrush I held in my hand. The potting didn't go too well and so, after a brief bout of hysterical screaming and running around on the spot like a demented scaredy-cat, I boshed it hard with the paintbrush. And then I put it in a pot.

After I finished work, I figured I really ought to identify the wasp to species. HBRG are now in their third out of five years collecting data on social wasps for a forthcoming Wasps of the Highlands Atlas. With wasps I always start by looking at the facial markings, and they almost always have a black 'anchor'-shaped mark which identifies them as Vespula vulgaris, the Common Wasp. This one was different

Tiny black dot on the clypeus instead of a big black anchor mark

This wasp also has a noticeably long face, thanks to an elongated malar space (the gap between the eye and jaw). Definitely not a bog-standard Vespula vulgaris. There aren't that many species of social wasp in Britain (even fewer on Skye) but I always seem to struggle remembering which is which. A complete lack of reddish tint on the abdomen led me to believe it probably wasn't Red Wasp, which left Tree Wasp as the next most likely. 

Clean yellow and black patterning - no red in there at all

I should mention now that it took a lot of courage on my part to pick up this wasp, even though I knew it was dead. I get stung several times each year down at the glass recycling station. Posting fifteen or so black sacks worth of beer bottles into the recycling bins twice a week can be a hazardous undertaking, sometimes I'll have maybe a dozen wasps bouncing around in the back of the van with me whilst I pop the bottles into the recycling bins. 

A surprisingly hairy beast!

This is Dolichovespula sylvestris, the Tree Wasp. I find it here on Skye every year, in fact I've recorded it from the hotel annually since 2017. But the species that I'm really hoping to encounter is Dolichovespula saxonica, the Saxon Wasp. It's a species currently expanding its range northwards and has recently been found within the Highland Region. It's not one I've seen before, so I shall continue to keep a look out for it up here.

The sharp end of a wasp...

Back in the 80s, when I was first discovering rock music, I stumbled across the band W.A.S.P. and for years believed it stood for We Are Sexual Perverts. Other interpretations include White Anglo Saxon Protestants, due to the lyrics of an early song. However, it seems that the words Winged Assassins could correspond to the W and A and it fits this post far better than does Sexual Perverts or Protestants.

I absolutely played this track to death when I was seventeen. Ignore the clichéd motorbikes, snow-washed jeans and excessive hairspray usage and just appreciate the music. Though you may need to close your eyes...