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Honey is a healing compound produced by the Apidae bees. So far, the only genus of Apis with 9 known species worldwide is a honey bee. But species of paper wasps in the Vespidae can also produce honey. This research was conducted to study and identify the species of paper wasp honey producer in the South of Kerman. For this purpose, the activity areas of this wasp were identified, and specimens of this paper wasp were collected for species identification. The specimens were identified by keys and related articles and Confirmed by Dr. James M. Carpenter at the American Museum of natural history. Parapolybia escalerae (Meado-Waldo) was described by Mead-Waldo in the London British Museum in 1911 as a single female specimen from southwestern Iran. The World distribution of this paper wasp is in Pakistan, Turkey, and Iran. According to the results of this study, the species Parapolybia escalerae (Meado-Waldo, 1911) was identified for the first time in southeastern Iran (south of Kerman). This species was distributed south of Kerman from the tropical foothills of Jabalbarz Mountains (southern Jabalbarz to Mohammadabad) and Bahraseman. Parapolybia escalerae is introduced in the world as a paper wasp species of a honey producer. The paper wasp is known as dry or chocolate honey and has medicinal use. In this study, the male and queen specimens were collected and identified for the first time. This study found that this species of paper wasp, like the Apis florea, produces wild honey. A. florea has open nests and small colonies of a single comb, but P. escalerae is in the dark space of mountains and cliffs and produces many combs. The activity of this species was mostly observed on the Ziziphus sp. and Pistacia terebinthus trees. This paper wasp has a social life and includes three forms of queens, workers, and males. So far, only two species of Honey producing paper wasps have been reported in South America, including Brachygastra mellifica (Say, 1837), known as the Mexican Honey Wasp and Brachygastra lecheguana (Latreille, 1824), which are paper wasps belonging to the subfamily Polistinae. These two species have round nests and build their nests on tall trees and the ground in open spaces. Their honey has medicinal use in different regions of South America and is collected by local people. The paper wasp species P. escalerae works in the crevices of the rocks and has several flat combs. In Iran, the local people of the southern regions of Iran use this honey as medicine to treat respiratory diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated associative learning of food odors by the European paper wasp Polistes dominula Christ (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) because of consistent low rates of attraction to food materials in laboratory assays. We hypothesized that wasps in nature exhibit nonspecific food-finding behavior until locating a suitable food, and then respond more strongly and specifically to odors associated with that food reward. Female P. dominula workers exhibited higher rates of attraction in a flight tunnel to piped odors of fermented fruit purees following previous experience with that puree, compared to wasps with no prior experience with the fermented fruits. Attraction behavior included upwind-oriented flight and casting within the odor plume, indicative of chemoanemotaxis. Synthetic chemicals representative of volatiles P. dominula may encounter in nature while foraging was also tested. Similar increases in attraction responses occurred following feeding experience with a sugar solution that included either 3-methyl-1-butanol or pear ester, but not eugenol. These experimental results support the hypothesis of associative learning of food odors in P. dominula. We discuss the ecological relevance of our results and suggest an alternative approach to trap paper wasps in pest situations utilizing learned chemical attractants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To compare the outcomes of ocular injuries of hornets and paper wasps’ stings.Study design: Retrospective case series.Methods: Patients diagnosed with ocular injuries sustained by bee stings at Miyata Eye Hospital (Miyazaki, Japan) between August 2000 and July 2016 were enrolled. Retrospective data regarding type of bee, visual acuity, and treatment were collected from medical records. Outcomes of the hornet and wasp groups were compared.Results: Five eyes of 5 patients (3 men, 2 women; mean age 44.6±21.2 years [range 9-62 years]) were enrolled. The mean follow-up period was 50.6 ± 57.6 months (range 4 days to 121 months). The causative bee was hornet in 3 cases and wasp in 2. The anterior chamber was irrigated in 2 patients, both from the hornet group. The best-corrected visual acuity at the final visit was no light perception, light perception, and (0.02) in the hornet group, (1.5) and (1.2) in the wasp group.Conclusions: The hornet group exhibited significantly worse prognosis than the wasp group. Identifying the type of bee is important in establishing prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The founding individuals of a new group or lineage are uniquely poised to have long-lasting effects on their descendants. Here we explore how the behavioural traits of new foundresses influence their task allocation strategies and the downstream collective behaviour of their colonies. We collected individual paper wasp ( Polistes metricus ) queens from the wild and measured their boldness, aggressiveness, exploration, activity and time budgets in the laboratory. We then provided queens with food and nest materials and waited for their workers to eclose. We subsequently tested for links between queen behavioural traits (e.g. boldness, aggressiveness) and the collective aggressiveness of their colonies, as estimated by the number of workers that responded to and stung a model predator. We found that bolder queens (i.e. queens that were less likely to leave their nests after repeated exposure to an agonistic stimulus) spent more time nest guarding, reared more workers and produced groups that were less responsive to a model predator. Thus, there appears to be parent–offspring, or queen–worker, resemblance in the degree to which individuals remain on their nests in different social contexts (solitary queen versus queen + her worker group). To our knowledge this represents the first study to explicitly test for links between individual variation in foundress behaviour, worker production and intercolony collective behaviour; the results highlight the possibility that cross-contextual and transgenerational behavioural links could be a reasonably common and potentially important phenomenon in complex societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additions to the knowledge of the paper wasp genus Polistes (Polistella) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Polistinae) from the northern part of Vietnam are presented. The males of two species, P. affinis Gusenleitner, 2006, and P. curcipunctum Nguyen, Kojima & Saito, 2011, are described for the first time. The nests of P. affinis Gusenleitner, 2006, and P. nipponensis Pérez, 1905, are also described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wasps of the genus Polistes build combs without any cover and hence are insufficiently protected against temperature fluctuations. Due to this fact, different types of thermoregulation of Polistes dominula nests were investigated using the modern method of thermography. The study of active mechanisms for nest thermoregulation revealed no brood incubation or clustering behaviour of P. dominula . Furthermore, we found out that wing fanning for cooling the nest was almost undetectable (4 documented cases). However, we could convincingly record that water evaporation is most effective for nest cooling. By the direct comparison of active (with brood and adults) and non-active (without brood and adults) nests, the start of cooling by water evaporation was detected above maximum outside temperatures of 25 °C or at nest temperatures above 35 °C. The powerful role of water in nest cooling was manifested by an average decrease of temperature of single cells of about 8 °C and a mean duration of 7 min until the cells reached again their initial temperature. The investigation of passive thermoregulatory mechanisms revealed that the architecture of the nest plays an important role. Based on the presented results, it can be assumed that the vertical orientation of cells helps maintaining the warmth of nests during the night, whereas the pedicel assists in cooling the nest during the day. Therefore, our study of nest thermoregulation has revealed that P. dominula wasps regulate the temperature of their nest actively by evaporative cooling and passively by a careful site selection and the architecture of their nests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Cooperative breeding decreases the direct reproductive output of subordinate individuals, but cooperation can be evolutionarily favored when there are challenges or constraints to breeding independently. Environmental factors, including temperature, precipitation, latitude, high seasonality, and environmental harshness have been hypothesized to correlate with the presence of cooperative breeding. However, to test the relationship between cooperation and ecological constraints requires comparative data on the frequency and variation of cooperative breeding across differing environments, ideally replicated across multiple species. Paper wasps are primitively social species, forming colonies composed of reproductively active dominants and foraging subordinates. Adult female wasps, referred to as foundresses, initiate new colonies. Nests can be formed by a single solitary foundress (noncooperative) or by multiple foundress associations (cooperative). Cooperative behavior varies within and among species, making paper wasps species well suited to disentangling ecological correlates of variation in cooperative behavior. This data set reports the frequency and extent of cooperative nest founding for 87 paper wasp species. Data were assembled from more than 170 published sources, previously unpublished field observations, and photographs contributed by citizen scientists to online natural history repositories. The data set includes 25,872 nest observations and reports the cooperative behavioral decisions for 45,297 foundresses. Species names were updated to reflect modern taxonomic revisions. The type of substrate on which the nest was built is also included, when available. A smaller population‐level version of this data set found that the presence or absence of cooperative nesting in paper wasps was correlated with temperature stability and environmental harshness, but these variables did not predict the extent of cooperation within species. This expanded data set contains details about individual nests and further increases the power to address the relationship between the environment and the presence and extent of cooperative breeding. Beyond the ecological drivers of cooperation, these high‐resolution data will be useful for future studies examining the evolutionary consequences of variation in social behavior. This data set may be used for research or educational purposes provided that this data paper is cited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]