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The Biology of Hover Wasps pp 61–87Cite as

Behaviour

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Abstract

This chapter describes the most common behavioural patterns of female and male Hover Wasps. Behaviours are divided into three main groups, depending on their functional categories: elementary behaviour (which ranges from feeding to mating), colony maintenance behaviour (directed towards rearing and defence of immature brood and nest construction) and social behaviour (mainly interactions with conspecifics and nestmates). These are further divided into behaviours performed on the nest and off the nest. Short videoclips for some behaviour are available online.

The video clips referred to in this chapter can be found under http://extras.springer.com or in the supplementary material (ESM) of the electronic version of this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In my description of this behaviour in five species of Parischnogaster (Turillazzi 1985b), I stressed the fact that, probably, the first bolus of abdominal secretion did not serve to attach the egg to the bottom of the cell. The main reason for this is that the egg is already furnished with a drop of secretion when it emerges from the tip of the abdomen. If we check laid eggs it is clear that the consistency and colour of the secretion which glue them to the bottom of the cells are somewhat different from those of the Dufour’s gland secretion. However Sakagami and Yamane (1990) contested this and proposed that in any case the drop visible on the convex part of the egg is in fact the same of that collected in the mouth by the wasp. I thought that the only way to clear this was to perform chemical analyses of the two substances and recently, helped by Luca Calamai of the Centre of Mass Spectrometry of University of Florence (C.I.S.M.), I performed Gas Chromatographic analysis obtaining almost identical spectra for the secretion placed on a recently laid egg of P. mellyi and for the small amount of secretion on which the egg was glued to the bottom of the cell: this undoubtedly confirms the hypothesis of Sakagami and Yamane that the substance that is present on the convex part of the egg just when it emerges from the gaster is also completely, or for the most part, produced by the Dufour’s gland (see also Fortunato and Turillazzi 2012).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dep of Evolutionary Biology “L. Pardi”, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy

    Stefano Turillazzi

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  1. Stefano Turillazzi
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3.1 Electronic Supplementary Material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

A female Parischnogaster alternata flying close a spiderweb (MP4 6304 kb)

Self grooming in Parischnogaster mellyi (MP4 19881 kb)

Abdominal substance collection by Anischnogaster (MPG 3997 kb)

Abdominal substance collection by Parischnogaster mellyi (MPG 35461 kb)

Egg deposition by Parischnogaster mellyi (MPG 98036 kb)

Feeding of a larva by Parischnogaster mellyi (MPG 6455 kb)

Food request and domination in Parischnogaster mellyi (MOV 9151 kb)

Food sharing after domination in Parischnogaster mellyi (MP4 6388 kb)

Dominance aggression and drop regurgitation in Parischnogaster mellyi (MP4 6965 kb)

Aggression and dominance in Parischnogaster mellyi (MP4 10104 kb)

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Turillazzi, S. (2012). Behaviour. In: The Biology of Hover Wasps. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32680-6_3

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