Insects Rule The Roost In The Kingdom Of Animalia

In the kingdom Animalia, where according to taxonomists, you and I are situated, insects rule the roost. There at least 6 million insects and each year nearly 8,000 new ones are discovered and described. All of the bees, hornets, wasps, yellow jackets and ants are in the third largest insect order, Hymenoptera.

The bumble bee is the first insect species that I came to know intimately. There were always a bunch of them flying around my mother’s nasturtiums and zinnias in the flower gardens that almost surrounded our little house in Mattituck where I grew up to teenage status. They didn’t seem to mind me studying them and following them around from flower to flower.

Once, at 8 years of age, I tried to catch one with my bare hands and I discovered that bumble bees sting. After stinging me, it dropped down to the ground and disappeared into the dense foliage. I thought it was dead, but apparently it wasn’t — bumble bees don’t die after stinging.

Ants were always hanging out on and between the bricks that made up the patio in the back of the Westphalia house. I would watch both red and black ants staging ant wars between them. I didn’t learn about the tiny Argentine ants from South America until I grew up. When we were kids in Mattituck, we played games of tag, hide-and-seek, red light-green light, and marbles, to mention the most popular. Driveways were always the preferred spots for marbles, and after an hour or so at it, one got to know the ants well — they preferred the empty sands to green lawns and gardens.

I knew that honey bees made honey without ever seeing one. When I was young, I reasoned that if bees made honey, house flies made marmalade. We had more house flies than one could shake a stick at. So I put an empty uncovered jar in the one-car garage and left it for several days having told both parents what I was after. A week went by, and I checked it out. Low and behold, it was full of marmalade. I ran and told my parents, they smiled in acknowledgment.

Before I turned 10, I was familiar with hornet and wasp nests, but didn’t know which species belonged to which. It wasn’t until I was in junior high school that I found out. I could never find a yellow jacket’s nest, but I followed them around. It wasn’t until one summer when a friend and I were in the woods on the north side of Bay Avenue near my aunt’s cottage on Peconic Bay that I found out. We were knocking down dead trees less than 3 or 4 inches in diameter, when all of a sudden a swarm of 50 or more yellow jackets that obviously had a nest near the tree’s base started stinging us. We high-tailed it to the bay about 150 feet away as quick as we could. And although the yellow jackets followed us all the way, we received very few stings —just enough to teach us where they had their nests.

It wasn’t until one flew into my room in my house on Noyac Road in Sag Harbor at night during a warm July night in 2020 that I got a very good look up close at a “killer” hornet. It was very large, about three inches in length. Yellow-and-black striped, it looked very much like the killer hornets from Asia that are attacking honey bee colonies along the upper Pacific Coast of America.

On closer inspection, and after a bit of a literature search, I discovered that my dead hornet was indeed a killer, a “cicada killer.” When I was part of a team in 1980 studying the fauna and flora of Mashomack, Shelter Island, before it became a Nature Conservancy preserve, I got my first glimpse of a cicada killer hornet. Only the female stings, and she makes straight-line flights of a few feet or more across a field to catch a periodic cicada, one of those that come out of the ground periodically as a larva to turn into a large flying and swarming insect. When she catches one, she hauls it back to her nest also in the ground to feed her larvae. In more than a year’s time, I saw but one cicada killer and only at a distance of a hundred yards or more.

When I moved back from California in 1975 to teach at Long Island University’s Southampton College, I became familiar with hornets and their crepe papery nests. I had never seen one of these large nests, as big as a football, on the outside of tree 10 to 20 feet up. Another surprise was a bee smaller than a bumble bee, but similarly yellow and black colored. When I saw one of these entering a small hole, no bigger than the diameter of a pencil in the side of my Noyac house, I had my first up close look of a carpenter bee. Soon, I saw others and began to wonder if they could be damaging. I read the literature — they can be!

I didn’t know that ants could fly until I saw a large swam of them over the beach where Georgica Pond meets the Atlantic Ocean. The last of the hymenoperterans I came to know intimately, was one of the most beautiful of all and it had an ant appellation, but was not a true ant. It is the velvet ant, the female of which species has a beautiful pelage of red and black velvet hairs. Beauty can be deceiving. One lives among the stones making up my Noyac home patio. This hymenopteran is exotically pretty, but don’t try to pick one up. They can give a powerful sting. It never has wings and so is eternally grounded. It has quickly become my favorite.

So much for my past professorial training. I had one course in entomology at Cornell University, but if I say that it just scratched the surface, I would be lying. It didn’t come close to scratching the surface. I am still learning and still very much a beginner.