Interesting life all around!

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I’m currently renovating an old property, and the other day I found this dead insect on the windowsill there. It’s rather a fearsome-looking creature, over an inch long, and I’ve never seen anything like it before, and neither had anyone I asked, so of course I had to look it up. After a bit of searching I identified it as a wood wasp (Urocerus gigas). Its yellow and black bands (which don’t show well in the photo, sorry) do make it look a bit like a wasp, but in fact it’s a species of sawfly and totally harmless. It lays its eggs in the wood of pine trees using a long ovipositor (so this one must be a female) and the larvae then spend up to five years developing in the wood before emerging as flying insects. They are not often seen as they spend their time around the tops of pine trees. Apparently they sometimes emerge inside houses when the wood has been used in construction since their long larval life means that the tree could be cut down, processed and used in building while they are living inside. In this case there are pine trees close around the outside of the house, so it could have flown in and got trapped, or it could have emerged from some wood used to build stud walls. Either way the poor thing wasn’t found soon enough to allow it to get out and fly away. But at least we all learned something from it I guess. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.