Occurrence of Social Wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) in a Sugarcane Culture

Abstract

Predation of Lepidoptera caterpillars - including agricultural pest species - is one of the main ways through which social wasps gather proteinaceous resources. The presence of social wasps was sampled through active search and bait traps through a sugarcane culture cycle, totaling 12 months. Our aim was to record the presence of these insects during the sugarcane development cycle in order to obtain data to support alternative pest control strategies. A total of 1091 individuals in seven genera and 20 species of social wasps were collected, including the swarm-founding Agelaia vicina and Polybia sericea (Hymenoptera: Vespidae). Social wasp richness and abundance were not correlated with climatic variables (temperature, humidity and precipitation). However, richness was negatively correlated to the sugarcane plants’ height (r= -0.4360, p= 0.05). The presence of social wasps during the plant’s cycle shows their potential as predators in sugarcane culture pest management.

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.…”

“…However, such aggregations may be less common in large-scale agricultural environments owing to scarcity of nesting sites. Social wasps are commonly sampled in Brazilian agricultural surveys [31,50], suggesting their foraging range is large; moreover, positive correlations have been found between plant growth and wasp species richness [31]. Tropical/ sub-tropical Polistes are especially promising biocontrol agents because of their need to provision brood throughout extended nesting cycles.…”

“…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.…”

Occurrence and nesting behavior of social wasps in an anthropized environment

“…Moreover, they represent places where there is less competition for resources among many species, and even predation rates by natural enemies may be lower (Prezoto et al, 2007). Finally, considering the generalist diet of social wasps, it was suggested that their presence near sugarcane areas can be beneficial, because these insects may perform natural biological control against different sugarcane pests, such as Diatraea saccharalis, Mocis latipes and Spodoptera frugiperda (Barbosa et al, 2018).…”

“…Even though insects are found to be spread worldwide, few approaches have analyzed the urbanization effect over them, especially in neotropical regions (Lima et al, 2000;McIntyre, 2000;de Barros Alvarenga et al, 2010;Detoni et al, 2018). Information concerning how wasps respond to urbanization is almost scarce, especially for the social species (Detoni et al, 2018), which perform different ecological roles over the environments where they live, acting as predators of different agricultural pests (Oliveira et al, 2017b;Barbosa et al, 2018), as detritivores of decaying fruits or animal carcasses (Barbosa et al, 2014;Clemente et al, 2012), as fruit damagers (De Souza et al, 2010a), as pollinators (Somavilla & Köhler, 2012), and even like environmental quality indicators (De Souza et al, 2010b).…”