Wasp on goldenrod
Crabronidae
Crabronid wasp · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 19 August 2026
A wasp working goldenrod upside down in the August border, curled to reach the flowers from below. Goldenrod in August is the wasp plant of the eastern meadows, and the crabronid hunting wasps come to it in numbers.
Black, with yellow marks on the face and the shoulders and yellow bands across the abdomen, stout rather than thread-waisted - the look of one of the crabronid hunting wasps, most likely a beewolf, Philanthus, which stocks its burrows with paralysed bees and is one of the commonest wasps on goldenrod in August. A weevil wasp of the genus Cerceris looks much the same from this angle, so I've left it at family.
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