How Are Ants, Wasps, and Bees Related?
What comes to mind when someone mentions bees or wasps or ants? Do you recoil a little bit at memories of painful stings or ruined picnics? Perhaps you might feel differently if you knew that those creatures may benefit humans more than any other insect group. With more than 150,000 named species (compared with 10,400 birds and 5,500 mammals), ants, bees, and wasps are the three main types of insects that form the order Hymenoptera, one of most abundant and ecologically important animal groups on Earth. Read on to learn more about these incredible organisms.
Bees: Supreme Pollinators
There are more than 20,000 species of bees, only a handful of which are honeybees that live in hives and make honey for their queen. The vast majority of the planet’s bee species are solitary, and most actually nest in small tunnels in the soil. Their importance as pollinators cannot be overstated: bees sustain wild and cultivated plants in nearly every terrestrial ecosystem.
Meet the Honey-makers
Wasps: Beyond the Sting
Wasps are the most diverse and species-rich group of the order Hymenoptera, with more than 100,000 species known to science and tens of thousands more likely awaiting formal discovery. While social wasps, such as hornets and yellow jackets, are the most familiar, most wasps are solitary insects. Remarkably, the majority of wasps on Earth are parasitic as larvae, slowly feeding on living hosts (typically other insects or spiders), before adopting a more tranquil diet of pollen and nectar as adults. Many of these wasps, known as parasitoids, help control the populations of both agricultural and wild pests and are vital to food webs.
Ants: Social Powerhouses
All ants are social insects, and each of their amazing colonies basically functions as a single organism. There are about 10,000 species of ants, and they are superabundant. It is estimated that there are 2.5 million ants on Earth for every human being. These busy animals often have a disproportionate impact on the ecosystems they inhabit, being noted as seed dispersers, plant defoliators, and drivers of soil turnover. They are also remarkable for their unique and complicated social structures and natural histories, which include fungus farming, herding aphids, and enslaving other ants, to name but a few.
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