At or recent Wonderful Wasps! event, we learned what a diverse group of insects wasps are and how important they are to the environment. We finished by making marvellous model wasps. Here’s a template for making one of your own at home. Some parts of this ‘make’ are a little trick but we think the end result is well worth it!
What you will need
A print-out of the template. Ideally print the body parts on yellow card but paper will work too. Print the wings onto white paper
2 Carefully make cuts in the card as shown by the dotted lines.
3 Arrange the thorax, abdomen and last segment pieces in a line. Staple a pipe cleaner to these pieces as shown in the pictures below.
4 Staple the wings onto the thorax.
5 Fold the last segment into a cone shape and secure with a staple.
6 Bend each abdominal section into a circle, slipping the slots together to secure it.
7 Bend the thorax into a circle, slipping the slots together to secure it.
8 Thread 3 pipe cleaners through the holes in the thorax to make 6 legs.
9 Bend the sides of the head together, slipping the slots together to secure it.
10 Staple the bottom edges of the head together
11 Staple the thorax end of the pipe cleaner onto the flap forming the top of the head. Push the end, attached to the tab into the slot.
12 Attach the eyes to the head by pushing the tabs into the slots.
13 Use the waist to connect thorax and abdomen by pushing the tabs into the slots.
14 Tie one end of a string to the pipe cleaner between the thorax and abdomen and the other end between the head and thorax.
Your wasp puppet is now ready!
We hope you enjoyed building your model wasp. When you have finished playing with it, you can use the pipe cleaners for another craft activity and recycle the rest of your model. If you enjoy craft, you might also like to try to try your hand at making an Origami Ladybird.
In the latest of our series of interviews with people who work with insects, we talk with Darren Mann, who is Collections Manager at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford, and an expert in dung beetles.
How did you first become interested in insects?
I’ve always been interested, as long as I can remember. I was one of those kids who had ice-cream tubs full of caterpillars, spiders and woodlice in jars, and tadpoles in buckets. I started the serious study of insects when I was ten.
My junior school teacher Terry Denman pretty much changed my life. He was a vegetarian, as was I and we veggies were rare back then. More importantly, he had a real passion for natural history and that was apparent in our classroom, we had frogspawn and newts and even a fish tank full of Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches. Cockroaches were an unusual pet in those days, and when I left school he gave me three females and a male. I called him George, and they lived next to my bed – I think I cried with happiness when they had their first babies.
I was not always the most well-behaved or attentive kid at school. Mr Denman noticed I liked natural history and got me to work by saying ‘you need to write a story, write it about the cockroaches’. I used to sit by their tank and write about the cockroaches. Who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t found that avenue for me to put my energies into?!
What is your role at the Museum?
I have been very fortunate: the collections here at the museum are amazing! I spend about half my time working with the collections and doing research on beetles. About 20% of my job is teaching and outreach, giving lectures and talks, for students, visiting school kids and natural history groups. 10-15% is answering enquiries and giving advice, and pest identification “I found this bug in my garden what is it?” The remainder is administration and the paper work side of working with the collections.
Dung beetles from the museum collections
What is the beetle project you are working on?
In 2016, I was approached by English Nature, the government agency for nature conservation. They were reviewing the conservation of British animals and plants so they could update the conservation status of different species. If a species had been under threat of extinction, was that still correct today? Had the number of threatened species gone up or down?
The last review for beetles was done in 1992 and there were a lot of errors and it was out of date. One person had tried to do all beetles I one go and that’s an almost impossible task, there are over 4,000 different types in the UK! I was approached to do the Scarce and Threatened Review for dung beetles and chafers because that’s my favourite group. I declined as I didn’t have time to commit to a lot of extra work. I suggested my mate – Steve Lane, he did the bulk of work and then we spent time chatting and providing data and information. We gathered data from across the UK though amateur naturalists, museum collections and books and articles. Based on the number of records over the last 100 years, we calculated how the different species had changed and published our work.
A review of the status of beetles
It was an eye opener for me as there are a few species I thought were still widespread or common, that had drastically declined. However, I didn’t realise they were in trouble because they in were in parts of the UK I rarely visit. There’s the Cockchafer, everyone knows the May bug, and that’s doing ok. But there’s a second species – the chestnut cockchafer in Scotland, which is not doing so well. I’ve never seen it as I don’t go Cockchafer hunting Scotland. The only one’s being seen were from people light trapping for moths. We discovered more species were declining than were previously believed. Since you can’t be everywhere all the time you don’t notice some of these declines.
We wrote about all the endangered species, and over the last five years Ceri (my wife and dung beetle hunting partner) and myself have taken holidays in search of some our rarest dung beetles. So far we’ve found two species that were thought extinct in Britain, and a few that are critically endangered but hadn’t been seen for 15 years and one for nearly 90 years.
What is your favourite insect?
“A very pretty beetle” Onthophagus nuchicornis
It’s really difficult to choose just one, but I think my favourite is a dung beetle. We gave it the common name Dillwyn’s dung beetle (Onthophagus nuchicornis). As Lewis W. Dillwyn (1778-1855) was one of first people to catch it. It’s very pretty with a dark pattern contrasting against an almost cream background.
Ceri, Steve and myself have spent many years surveying across the UK for this beetle. Worryingly, its numbers have crashed more than any other UK dung beetle and it has gone extinct at over 90% of the sites where it used to live. In most cases we don’t know why this is, but this beetle is a good indicator of a broader decline in species.
Darren and his favourite Longhorn Cattle
If you enjoyed reading about Darren’s work as an entomologist, take a look at other posts about people who work with insects in our ‘People‘ section.
A very Happy New Year from the HOPE team at the Museum of Natural History. Here are the answers to our Crunchy on the outside Christmas Quiz which we posted on 21 December:
January: Bombuslapidarius
February: Amber
March: Erica McAlister
April: Game of Life Cycles
May: Sotiria Boutsi
June: A pooter
July: Vomit all over you!
August: Ladybirds
September: The Ivy Mining Bee, Colletes hederae
October: Harcourt Arboretum
November: Flies
December: Mistletoe
How many did you get right? Whatever your score, we hope you enjoyed our blog over the past year and we look forward to bringing you more news about amazing insects, the wonderful people who work with them, new things at the Museum, and fun things to make and do in 2023.
This year, our Christmas quiz features 12 questions about the Crunchy on the Outside blog, one for each month of the past year. Don’t worry if you have only just started reading the blog because we’ve included a link to each of the articles. It’s just a bit of fun; we’ll post the answers in the New Year.
January: What is the scientific name of the red-tailed bumblebee found by Lincoln Kwong?
In February, researcher Ricardo Pérez-de la Fuente told us about a substance that can preserve insects for millions of years. What is it?
Who did Kate interview for this post in March? They told us about their favourite insect, the Bee-fly.
In this post, we’re taking a festive look at an insect that rely on Mistletoe. Humans may enjoy kissing under it, but for the Mistletoe Marble Moth, Celypha woodiana, it’s food for their caterpillars.
Munching on mistletoe – don’t try this at home!
Larva of the Mistletoe Marble Moth, Celypha woodiana. Image: Patrick Clement CC BY 2.0
It would be a bad idea for us to try eating mistletoe because it’s poisonous to humans. For the Mistletoe Marble Moth, however, this is the food plant for their larvae. These overwinter snug inside mistletoe leaves. As the weather warms up the larvae become active and feed on them throughout the spring. In the picture above, you can see the trail the larva has left as it munched through the leaf.
In early summer, when they have grown large enough, the larvae pupate. The adult moths then emerge and fly in and around woodland and orchards containing fruit trees like apple.
The apple trees are important because they are a host for the mistletoe plant. Mistletoe can’t grow in it’s own. It relies on other trees. The berries are very sticky and when birds eat them they clean their beaks on by rubbing them on the bark of trees, the seeds get stick in tiny crevices and begin to grow out of the tree. The mistletoe plant grows into a ball on the brach of the host tree.
Mistletoe growing on a host tree
Apples are one of the trees mistletoe prefers. Sadly apple trees are becoming more scarce in Britrain because there are fewer orchards. This means there is also less mistletoe and that means that the Mistletoe Marble moth is becoming rarer. It is a priority species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan because scientists are worried that this species may become extinct in Britain.
Other insects on mistletoe
The Mistletoe Weevil, Ixapion variagatum Image U Schmidt CC BY-SA 2.0
This moth isn’t the only British insect that relies on mistletoe. The Mistletoe Weevil Ixapion variegatum feeds on the part of the stem behind buds and there are several bugs that feed on sap of the plant, and another that is a predator: so there can be a whole food chain on a sprig of mistletoe!
We won’t ask if you’re planning on kissing anyone under the mistletoe this year, but for those who like to bring it into the house, please remember that we also need to conserve it, and the many insects that rely on it, in the wild.
If you enjoyed reading about the Mistletoe Marble Moth, you may be interested in this article about the ways in which other insects survive the winter.
Many people are wary of wasps, they like interrupting our picnics, they can look a bit fierce, and some have a sting in the tail, but it’s well worth getting to know this amazingly diverse group of insects. Our next Crunchy on the outside event for young people interested in nature, and insects in particular, is Wonderful Wasps! It’s at the Museum on Wednesday 28 December, 10.30-12.00pm.
We’ll be finding out about some amazing wasp species, looking at the Museum collections to see the fantastic range of different wasps in the UK, and making our own wasp models.
Crunchy on the outside 