Sirex woodwasp
The sirex woodwasp is a wasp with a long, round body and no thin waist. The female is shiny steel blue with orange legs. She has a drill at the end of her body and uses it to make holes in pine trees, where she lays her eggs.
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Fun facts
The female's drill is made stronger with the metal zinc, so it can bore into hard wood.
Its jaws are so strong that grown-ups and larvae can chew through sheets of lead metal.
It travelled to Australia, New Zealand, South America and Africa hidden inside timber and firewood.
A big female can lay up to 500 eggs, one in each little hole she drills.
It likes to pick weak and thirsty trees, which it finds by their smell.
Most asked questions about Sirex woodwasp
?How big is a sirex woodwasp?
Between about 1 and 3.5 centimetres long. The females are usually bigger than the males.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Sirex noctilio
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Siricidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Siricidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania, North America, South America
- Also known as
- Midnight woodwasp, European woodwasp, European horntail woodwasp
Where the facts come from
- Sirex noctilio (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Sirex_noctilio_female_3.jpg : David R. Lance , USDA APHIS PPQ, United States derivative work: Toter Alter Mann ( talk ). CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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