An amazing French Guianan chalcid
I know it must seem like I have gone over to the dark-side but Hymenoptera aren’t all bad … Jean sent me a few tubes of wasps in his recent batch and it didn’t take long before I found some really exquisite insects – like this one. Normal chalcids are tiny little things but this one is 15mm from head to tail … yup, I said 15mm!! With colours like a ruby-tail wasp it is absolutely incredible – have a look:
Amazing creature! The 1st image looks like something out of a fairytale.
Nice to see some Hymenoptera.. there’s hope for you yet young Flywalker..
Hehe – Flywalker … I love it … I might pinch that for a nickname! 😉
I think Jean extracts all the larger Hymenoptera for another friend but I get whatever remains – so all the tiny stuff & Diptera etc. I often come up with things like this pteromalid(?) and fat-thighed chalcidids … I’ll take some photos of those later 🙂 The nice bit about being given some of the large Hymenoptera is that I now have a starter collection of French Guianan Stephanoidea & Evanoidea. I need to double-check that I have the correct groupings by running them through Goulet & Huber but I think those look fairly likely.