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Keithspangle — Tarantula Hawk
Published: 2019-05-27 18:36:08 +0000 UTC; Views: 966; Favourites: 39; Downloads: 4
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Description
An enormous wasp!Related content
Comments: 18
Oh wow! I was born and raised in Oklahoma and down there they are blue winged and really big enough to take on tarantulas. This a real beauty! Hmm was looking around, (thanks to Google) and most images are red winged. Are the females red winged and the males blue?
Found this. This is what the ones I saw as a kid looked like.
www.arizonensis.org/sonoran/fi…
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As I understood it, there are two varieties, red-winged and blue-winged, both with a nasty sting. I also read that they will gorge on fermented fruit until they are too drunk to fly....maybe that's what the blue-wing guys are for: to pull over the drunks.
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I hear that the Tarantula Hawk's sting is in the top ten Worst Stings Ever...which may explain why he (she) was so good natured...no one is about to annoy him (her). According to Wikipedia, the only critter that will actually try to eat one is a roadrunner. I've been stung by some of the local honeybees...they are very docile to start with and I suspect that the stings were more or less accidental, like when one climbed inside my shoe (looking for what, I can only guess)and I was trying to get my foot out so I could remove him.
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I have never really been stung by a honey bee that I recall. Lots of yellow jacket wasps in my life though! I hate that. The bumble bee and once I got stung by a scorpion. Just the little 2 inch long ones that are sand colored. It felt like liquid fire but the worst thing that I have ever had sting me are those red ants. I am very allergic to them. I had one bite me once in the summer on my foot and where it stung me swelled up to about the size of a silver dollar. I had shooting pains in my leg clear up to past my knee. The area was really hot to the feel and was very hard and very red.
I don't know if they are what everyone calls "fire" ants or not. I always thought fire ants were different. This was not red and black, but just red and about half an inch long. They used to make gigantic dens where I lived.
We also used to see what we called "Cow Ants" and luckily never got stung by one of these!
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetec…
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No fire ants down here(that I've seen). We had them in Santa Fe and, especially after getting bit a few times, I did my best to eradicate them. The black ants down here are bad enough. I seem to recall getting stung by a wasp when I was a kid....it didn't hurt much at all. Maybe that wasp was a slacker and didn't put his back into it! Also got hit by a little grey scorpion once...that didn't hurt much either. But those fire ants...wow!
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The ant sting is by far the most painful of any I have ever had, even the bumble bee wasn't as bad as that. I think the acid that ants inject is an alkaloid base and some people are allergic to that.
But don't you live out there with those big black scorpions that are very toxic to people?
We were around orchards when I was a kid on the farm and yellow jackets just love ripe pears. It is not any fun!
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Formic Acid, I believe. I haven't seen any of those black scorpions...or any scorpions for that matter. Or tarantulas, for which I might thank the wasp. I had a 6 inch centipede trot across my chest in the middle of the night up in Santa Fe....I was surprised I didn't leave a dent in the ceiling! I know I'm supposed to be all cool and groovy with nature, but I can't abide those things!
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Oh, I hear you on those centipedes! When I was a kid they used to crawl up on the outside of our window screens in the summer when it was really humid! They were huge! They creeped me out then and they still do! I like snakes, and spiders, bugs, dragonflies, damselflies, birds of course, and all kinds of animals; but centipedes are just too freaky! I lived in Oklahoma and they were those creepy black bodied, yellow legged, red headed ones!
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They're all creepy. I am glad they're not living here!
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