"Good" wasps?
In a couple weeks I'm going to be giving a presentation on yellow jackets to our ZooTeens (teenagers hired to work at the zoo for the summer). My primary objective is to turn these young people into my eyes and ears and get early warning about yellow jacket situations before they are hopeless. My secondary objective is to educate them about insects in general and wasps in particular, and get across the idea that these animals are mostly positive actors in our ecosystem, and it's only when you introduce large amounts of human garbage that they become problematic. Perhaps I'm not being totally honest about my primary and secondary objectives.
I haven't decided how deep to get into the subject. I definitely want to describe the differences between solitary wasps, social wasps, and bees, but do I bring up ichneumons, like this beauty here? I think I probably will.
