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Photo#820925
Sphecius speciosus

Sphecius speciosus
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, USA
August 5, 2013
This species is becoming more and more common in S. Central PA every year. 5 years ago I never would have thought of seeing even one on a peach.

But
You found them on peaches last year:

And why not peaches?

 
Yes, but
I said "5 years ago I never would have thought of seeing even one on a peach", I've been seeing them increasingly each year since ~2010 on peaches.

I'm not sure why they didn't use to be as common on peaches. They didn't even use to be common at all 5 years ago.

 
Fragrance
To me, peaches would seem to be more potentially attractive than other fruits, especially when the skin has been broken, exposing the flesh of the fruit and the water and sugars it contains. My attempts to attract insects with what I termed "strawberry dew" incline me to think about that. The dilute solution of Hershey's Strawberry Syrup that I used for this was quite fragrant, and the rapidity with which it attracted various kinds of Hymenoptera, including Ichneumonidae, inclined me to suppose the fragrance was an important factor. However, this person used peaches and grapes to attract insects and found that the grapes attracted Megarhyssa macrurus which appeared to ignore the peaches.

 
I don't bait with peaches...
However they do attract a good variety of beetles, lepidopterans and hymenopterans. I regularly see giant hornets as well as other Vespula and Dolichovespula. The only time I bait it is with a mixture of sugar water, syrup and rotten fermenting bananas.

 
the year i had truckloads
of peaches and they were rotting on the ground I had hundreds of critters on them day and night. I got catocalas I have never seen before or since and all sorts of other bugs. it was a drunken hoo haw out there.

 
Interesting
It is quite unusual to see stinging wasps other than Vespinae on damaged fruit. It seems to work very well for this species. Thanks for sharing the image!

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