Great black wasp
The great black wasp is a big, all-black wasp with smoky wings that shimmer blue in the sun. The mother digs a nest under the ground. She fills it with katydids for her babies to eat.
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Fun facts
Each baby wasp has its own little room in the nest and eats 2 to 6 katydids.
Sneaky birds like house sparrows sometimes steal the katydids the mother has caught.
It helps flowers like milkweed by carrying their pollen.
The first article about an insect ever written by someone born in America, in 1749, was about this wasp.
Most asked questions about Great black wasp
?How big is the great black wasp?
About 2 to 3.5 centimetres long. The females are bigger than the males.
?What does the great black wasp eat?
The adults drink nectar from flowers. The babies eat katydids and grasshoppers.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sphex pensylvanicus
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1763
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Sphecidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Sphecidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Great black digger wasp
Where the facts come from
- Sphex pensylvanicus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Rhododendrites. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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