Posted March 01, 2018
Last year I was surprised to learn that there is a wasp which makes honey, the “Mexican Honey Wasp.” Since this wasp is also present in Guatemala, we began looking for it.
Last week, while in a school in the remote mountains parallel to the Rio Cahabon, Guatemala (donating educational material to the teachers to utilize for the primary school Q’eqchi’ Mayan children), one of the teachers said that the wasps I was photographing were actually honey producers.
This is the second time this year that local people have said there were more than one kind of honey wasp. Snag is that other than the well known Mexican honey wasp there is not much on the Internet to allow us to easily identify the other species.
We are studying pollinators of the plants of Mesoamerica: bees, wasps, beetles, flies, and mammals. We have now photographed male mosquitos several times on the same flowers as bees and wasps in our FLAAR Mayan Ethnobotanical Research Garden around our office.
We look forward to contributing to knowledge of honey wasps that are native to Guatemala.
In this photo the lighting angle allows you to see the remains of the honey cells of an earlier nest. The earlier nest was probably knocked off months ago (and then the wasps returned to build their new nest to the right side of the remains of the destroyed nest).
These particular wasps are capable of stinging but the school teacher said they do not sting anywhere near as frequently as other species of wasps.
In other words, it is polite not to destroy their nests.
