Yellowjacket - 2nd image added

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 7:32 pm

Eastern Yellowjacket (Vespula maculifrons), male
Sleeping on outside deck, moved into garage to photograph (5x08).
Anchor-shaped mark on tergum 1 is characteristic. The long straight antennae with 2 basal segments and 11 apical segments (flagellomeres), and the elongate body with 7 segments identify this individual as a male (females have 2 + 10 antenna segments and have a sharp bend in the antenna, and only 6 body segments). Males do not survive over winter.
Length: 15 mm
More info HERE
D2Xs, AF 105mm Micro Nikkor, f/22. Converted to sRGB SEE HERE
EDIT: date correcetd

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:39 pm

A very beautiful documentation shot!

I'm weak on yellowjacket habits. Are they like honeybees, where all the work is done by the females, and males are produced only to breed?

--Rik

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 2:53 am

Males, drones, produced in Fall with new queens; mate and die. Here in the north (NA) Only the fertilized new queens survive the winter.

Sex determination in Yellowjackets, and other Hymenoptera, is odd compared to that in mammals. Males develop from unfertilized eggs and therefor have only one set of chromosomes (from their mother). This means that all a male's sperm is identical in terms of genes. As a queen mates only once, all her fertilized eggs which give rise to females (workers or queens) are genetically identical. Thus all the workers in a wasp nest are the equivalent of identical twins, except there can be hundreds of them. Helps understand why they will die in defending their nest.
(worth reading: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press)

Harold Gough · Post by **Harold Gough** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 3:41 am

Honeybee drones are produced in spring and summer, from a small proportion of eggs laid by the queen. They can also be produced from the eggs of workers in the absence of a functional queen.

The drones mate with young queens produced in crowded colonies in the swarming season (spring/early summer) or with replacement (supersedure) queens at any time when the queen is lost (e.g. injured by handling) or becomes too old to function fully.

Honeybee queens mate high in the air, generally some distance from the hive, with up to a dozen males over a period of a few days. This tends to happen at mating stations where drones gather from up to a considerable distance away. Queens mate only during their first flights and not again for the remainder of their lives, which can be up to five years. A queen will then leave the hive only during swarming or in the event of a disaster, such as fire. After mating, the queens can no longer feed themselves, relying on young workers.

Remaining drones are driven out of the hive in the autumn, after a season of little more than hanging around, eating and drinking.

Harold

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 1:14 pm

Face of the above male.

Notice how the antennae come from the head in a gentle curve - male feature.
Compare this with Doug's female HERE where the antennae take a sharp turn soon after leaving the head capsule.

D2Xs 21cm extension MF105mm Micro Nikkor reversed at full extension f/8 on lens, 29 images @ 0.2mm, HF 4.1

Graham Stabler · Post by **Graham Stabler** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 1:56 pm

It is striking how neatly the wings are folded. Great shot!

Graham

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 7:51 am

You can tell he is a bum and does not do anything for himself. Look at the hair on his face. he has more hair than I have ever seen on a Yellowjacket

Really great photos NU. Very nice job on the hair.

Planapo · Post by **Planapo** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 12:10 pm

Very nice and crisp images!

NikonUser wrote:

As a queen mates only once, all her fertilized eggs which give rise to females (workers or queens) are genetically identical. Thus all the workers in a wasp nest are the equivalent of identical twins, except there can be hundreds of them.

This is not correct. Even in those eusocial hymenopterans that actually do only mate once, in the diploid female, as in other diploid organisms including man, the gametes (i. e. eggs) are produced through meiosis where the (a priori not identical) two chromosomes of the homologous pair can exchange fragments in a mechanism called crossing-over and then are separated and randomly distributed to the resulting cells, and consequenly the eggs that develop from these cells are not "genetically identical", and thus the workers are not the "equivalent of identical twins".

However, it is correct that male-haploidy leads to values of relatedness that are different from those of animals with other sex determination mechanisms: Provided a colony with a single, once-mated, outbred queen, then the workers are more closely related to their sisters (0.75) than they would be to their own daughters (0.5). Which is seen as a strong point why eusociality, where female workers help their mother raising the next generation, instead of reproducing sexually on their own, has evolved serveral times independently within the Hymenoptera.

(BTW, research of the last few decades has shown some weird alterations of the general rules within the eusocial Hymenoptera. Even the production of female offspring from unfertilized eggs has been discovered. So nature is more complicated as textbooks tell us, and it is best to keep in mind that oftentimes one should say/write "generally..., but there are exceptions". And with more than 12000 species of ants alone described so far, there are almost certainly some more striking surprises to be discovered, if those life forms are not lost by extinction before examined.)

--Betty

edited grammar: "closer related" to "more closely related".

NikonUser · Post by **NikonUser** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:26 pm

Betty: Thanks for correcting my statement. I mis-read Dawkins and should have said "The workers are the equivalent of identical twins as far as their paternal genes are concerned."
Better still I should not have ventured into this topic but should have just stuck with the photography.
Live and learn.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:09 pm

NikonUser wrote:Better still I should not have ventured into this topic but should have just stuck with the photography.
Live and learn.

I, for one, am grateful that you did venture into this topic. While your statements turned out to be not 100% correct, they were a valuable step toward getting an even better explanation in front of readers like myself.

To my eye, the big lesson here is only in the value of softeners like "If I understand correctly" when discussing material that one is not personally pretty sure about. There is no shame in understanding incorrectly on first reading. Lots of us take many more tries than that to get new stuff right...

--Rik

Planapo · Post by **Planapo** » Thu Oct 09, 2008 11:15 pm

NikonUser wrote:

Better still I should not have ventured into this topic but should have just stuck with the photography.

No, please don´t. I totally agree with Rik´s point of view.

Topics like this one are not easily to understand on first glance/reading, but venturing into them can broaden one´s horizon enormously.
(But be warned

: Venturing more deeply into modern evolutionary biology can have a strong impact on one´s view on life in general, including life of the animal species we ourselves belong to.)
Dawkins' book you mentioned is, as you said, very much worth reading.

Let´s keep on venturing into new topics and learning from each other!

--Betty