Nidification of Polybia platycephala and Polistes versicolor (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) on Plants of Musa spp. In Minas Gerais State, Brazil

Abstract

Social wasps are natural enemies of caterpillars and, therefore, they have potential to control insect pests in various crops. Three colonies of Polybia platycephala (Richards) and one of Polistes versicolor (Olivier) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) were found on plants of banana (Musa spp.) in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. These colonies were at 3.50 m high, under the leaves, which provide shelter from environmental stress.

Social wasps are effective biocontrol agents of key lepidopteran crop pests

“…owing to higher foraging rates than solitary wasps [58], their tendency to fixate on the most abundant prey source [48], and already being a model species in the study of animal behaviour [59]. Moreover, there are around 1000 species of social wasps, with many genera distributed in a cosmopolitan fashion across the globe, appearing to thrive in disturbed and agricultural habitats [28][29][30][31][32][33]. We conducted a controlled experiment, which provides evidence that native social wasps could be effectively employed as biocontrol agents of lepidopteran pests in economically important crops.…”

“…The potential in harnessing predatory wasps in biocontrol was recognized over a century ago when Polistes paper wasps were identified as important predatory enemies of cotton worm Alabama argillacea [19,20,27]. More recent work has shown that wasps are common in a range of agricultural environments [28][29][30][31][32][33] and that pest lepidopterans form a main or significant portion of wasp forage [21,24,[34][35][36][37][38][39]. One concern is that the overall impact of predatory wasps on crop pests may be limited, as many pests hide within the plant, potentially making them inaccessible to hunting wasps.…”

“…29, n = 43, p = 0.257, mean time to predate = 611 ± 103 s; FAW: x 2 1 ¼ 1:23, n = 51, p = 0.267, mean time to predate = 318 ± 56 s). Likewise, pest size had no significant effect on time taken for successful predation in either pest species (SB:x 2 1 ¼ 3:75, p = 0.053; FAW: x 2 1 ¼ 0:23, p = 0.629).…”