>> |
Anonymous
Incidentally, what the hornet in the OP picture is doing is drinking the nectar right out of the unfortunate honeybee's gut. Wasps and hornets get their sugar fix from a variety of sources--flowers, fruit, aphid honeydew, man-made sweets, even mushrooms--but the big hornets' powerful jaws allow them to exploit some food sources that are unavailable to their smaller cousins. This species also frequently girdles twigs (especially of oak trees) with its jaws in order to drink the sap. Any wasps will opportunistically take sap from existing wounds, but only hornets actually "tap" trees themselves.
|