Paper wasp on partridge pea
Polistes sp.
Paper wasp · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 19 August 2026
A paper wasp working partridge pea in the August border, with a dark carpenter or digger bee visiting one of the plant's yellow flowers just below. Partridge pea is a native annual of sandy ground across the East, and it draws insects not with its flowers but with glands on the leaf stalks that leak nectar.
Partridge pea flowers offer pollen but no nectar, so most of what brings insects to the plant is those leaf glands. The reddish-brown colour, with little yellow in it, makes this one of the native paper wasps, Northern or Metric, rather than the yellow-and-black European species that has taken over much of the city.
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