Red-banded Sand Wasp
Ammophila sabulosa · Bees & wasps
Red-banded Sand Wasp
Great Dixter, 8 June 2025
A Red-banded Sand Wasp paused on the golden leaves of a shrub at Great Dixter in June, a beautyberry's flower clusters just coming into bud behind it. It is a solitary wasp of sandy heaths and gardens across Britain and Europe, and it hunts caterpillars through the borders in early summer.
The long, thread-thin waist with its band of red before the clubbed tip of the abdomen is the mark, and the blue is a sheen on black rather than a colour of its own, which is what made it so hard to place from one frame. The female digs a short burrow in sandy ground, hunts a caterpillar often larger than herself, paralyses it and drags it home, lays a single egg on it and seals the burrow, sometimes tamping the entrance down with a pebble held in her jaws. One of the few insects recorded using a tool.
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