Crabronid wasp
Crabronidae · Bees & wasps
Wasp on goldenrod
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.
Wasp on goldenrod
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 13 August 2026
A solitary wasp working across a goldenrod spray in the August border, antennae held well out ahead as it checks each floret in turn. Goldenrod in August is the great wasp plant of the eastern meadows and gardens, and every hunting wasp in the neighbourhood comes to it.
Goldenrod's clusters of small, shallow flowers are open to almost any visitor with a short tongue, which is why a single spray can draw wasps, flies, beetles and bees all foraging within inches of each other. This one is hard to place more precisely than a rough family from a single side view; the build and yellow banding suggest one of the smaller crabronid wasps rather than anything in the Polistes group, but it is a tentative call.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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