[00:00:00] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] On a previous episode with educator Ron Spendal, he gave an account of a typical conversation he has with somebody from the public and he says, "how many bees do you know?" People typically say "three, a honeybee, a bumblebee, and a yellow jacket." And it struck me that we haven't had a show on social wasps - ever. Well, this is about to change. I met Megan Asche when I was last up at Washington State University, she's a PhD candidate in the Department of Entomology at WSU. Megan has a fascinating research project focused on Polistes wasps those are the paper wasps and they're a fascinating group of wasps. For one thing, they're social, but all the individuals, the queens and the workers are all the same size. 

[00:00:46] But also as she explains, these nests are completely exposed - there's no covering so you can observe the behavior really well. She's also going to get into the other social wasps we have in the Pacific Northwest - the difference between a yellow jacket and a [00:01:00] hornet, which I know is on everybody's minds these days. But also her work has a kind of connection to space flight strangely. And I know we've recently had the Falcon 9 rocket go up to the space station. So this is going to cover everything you ever wanted to know about wasps and more, with Megan Asche this week on PolliNation.

[00:01:24] When I got this job, people were constantly confusing bees with social wasps. And I suppose this is an honest mistake as bees are in fact, an offshoot of a much, much larger pool of wasp genera. But I imagine this comes with considerable confusion, that there is actually diversity in the social wasps. Everybody thinks about yellow jackets. Can you walk us through the different social wasps in the Pacific Northwest and sort of like the way in which their social behavior is not also one thing, how variable [00:02:00] it is?

[00:02:01] Megan Asche: [00:02:01] Yeah, absolutely. So the wasps I study are in the family Vespidae. And you know, when I talk to other entomologists, I go to conferences and then they ask me, "hey, what's your research species? Or what's your research group?" I always say, "wasps" and then I pause and go, "the stinging kind, not the parasitoid kind". In the family Vespidae, we have an entire range of levels of sociality going from completely solitary to highly, highly social. Meaning that we have wasps that behave very, very similarly to the solitary bees. So things like Andrenids and Halictids, we have wasps that are social to the level that we would equate them to something like say a bumblebee colony. I always kind of compare them to bumblebee colonies cause their cycles are very, very similar.

[00:02:51] So in the highly social category in the family Vespidae we're looking at things like yellow jackets, [00:03:00] hornets and paper wasps - which is the group that I study. In the Pacific Northwest we have yellow jackets and we have paper wasps. We do not currently have any established. So the introduced species that everybody's talking about this Vespula mandarinia V. mandarinia has just kind of has shown up - we wouldn't consider that to be an established hornet here. And we do have a yellow jacket species that we call hornets, but they aren't, which is the bald-faced hornet not a yellow jacket. So if anybody asks you, if they've seen any hornets. - it's very, very unlikely here in the Pacific Northwest.

[00:03:44] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:03:44] Okay. So let me get this straight. So even that black and white colored social insect is technically, much more related to yellow jackets - it's not technically a hornet. Oh, I see. Alright. 

[00:04:00] [00:04:00] Megan Asche: [00:04:00] So there's two genera of yellow jackets in the Pacific Northwest. We have Dolichovespula, which are broadly the aerial yellow jackets. And we have Vespula which are more ground nesting yellow jackets. The bald-faced hornet is an aerial yellow jacket. 

[00:04:17] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:04:17] I see. Okay. All right. Keep going!

[00:04:21] Megan Asche: [00:04:21] So going back to their social systems. So yellow jackets here in the Pacific Northwest are on an annual colony cycle - very, very similar to bumblebees. So what you see is the new queens that are produced at the end of the summer season in the fall, mate and then they're the ones that overwinter. And once it warms up and it's spring again, they come out of hibernation, forage for a while, begin a nest and then start the colony cycle from the beginning. What's interesting about them is the queens are very large and can often have distinct coloration, very similar to bumblebees, and the workers are fairly diminutive [00:05:00] and could have a totally different coloration similar to bumblebees.

[00:05:04] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:05:04] I'll be darned. And the males as well can they look even different? 

[00:05:08] Megan Asche: [00:05:08] So we can actually tell the difference between male Vespid wasps and females very easily because of their antenna length. So their antenna are often longer and kind of curly. And besides the usual, like how do you tell the difference between male and female stinging insects, the males don't sting. So they'll often have a different kind of tip of their abdomen and will have things like claspers. So they'll have something there that just looks slightly different than a female's abdomen.

[00:05:36] So the Polistes paper wasps, which are also social are also eusocial - so they're like yellow jackets in that way. They're also on an annual colony cycle, but there's a very distinct difference between them and the yellow jackets. And that is the fact that the queens and the workers look almost identical, they don't have different coloration and they're frequently not a different size. You might see a slightly larger one, [00:06:00] but us as humans that can't rely on pheromones to differentiate between them - we can't tell the difference for the most part. And yeah, so the way we can tell if a paper wasp is in fact a queen, is you can actually dissect them out and see those ovaries, how big and developed those ovaries are and whether or not she has sperm in the spermatheca. That's like the easiest, most definitive way to tell if a specimen is a queen - granted, you have to kill the animal in order to do that, but that's kind of the easiest way to be able to tell.

[00:06:32] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:06:32] That's fascinating. I guess paper wasps are overlooked. People probably see them and think, "Oh this is the start of a yellow jacket." It's like they see the small pedicel. Tell us a little bit about their life cycle. And how many species do we have in the Pacific Northwest? 

[00:06:50] Megan Asche: [00:06:50] So it's interesting. So we actually have a single Polistes paper wasp in Washington state. I'm not totally sure exactly how many species you guys have down in Oregon. [00:07:00] In Washington state our native paper wasp is Polistes aurifer, and it's part of the fulscoe Polistes group. There's actually a bunch of close relatives to it in the South. And it's yellow and brownish in coloration and its range actually will travel all the way down into Texas - and you'll see a lot of color variability depending upon what range they're in.

[00:07:21] However, like many states, if not all the states in the United States, we also have the introduced paper wasp Polistes dominula which is a European paper wasp that was brought to the United States in the 1970's. When you have paper wasps nests on your home, so under eaves, under your deck, maybe in the side mirrors of your car - that is more than likely Polistes dominula. They're very, very attracted to human dwellings. 

[00:07:46] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:07:46] If you're a beekeeper this time of year, you start seeing them under handholds or restored equipment. They really just start little nests and away they go. 

[00:07:55] Megan Asche: [00:07:55] Yeah, they can nest in just about anything. And even though they wouldn't be considered a cavity [00:08:00] nester, they do nest in things like pipes and handrails and weird places you don't think they're going to be. And that's often when people get stung is when they come into contact with something that's partially hidden and they didn't even know it was there in the first place.

[00:08:14] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:08:14] Our native species, you said they're not as common? We don't regularly see them?

[00:08:20] Megan Asche: [00:08:20] And you're going to find them in Central Washington and Eastern Washington. I grew up in Olympia, Washington and spent most of my adult life there and you're hard pressed to find the native paper wasp species over there. But what they have on that side of the state from the Western side of Washington is Microstigmus flabatarsus which is a different genus of paper wasp that we have in the United States.

[00:08:42] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:08:42] I'll be darned. Please go ahead. 

[00:08:47] Megan Asche: [00:08:47] I was going to say we only have three species of Microstigmus in all the continental United States and Washington state has one of them. 

[00:08:53] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:08:53] Oh, fantastic. 

[00:08:55] Megan Asche: [00:08:55] Yes. The other two can be found in the Southeast. So, Microstigmus [00:09:00] cubensis and Microstigmus mexicanas.

[00:09:02] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:02] Okay, well, walk us through a little bit - we are familiar with the introduced European species. I think all of us have seen it at some point or other, but walk us through how these nests are formed. And you said they're like bumblebee, so there's presumably a mated queen that starts the whole thing. Walk us through their life cycle. 

[00:09:21] Megan Asche: [00:09:21] Yeah. So they're on an annual colony cycle, which begins in the spring where mated queens that were produced in the late summer and were mated in the fall, come out of hibernation and begin to forage. So what the queen is doing is she's collecting as much nectar as possible, building up her ovaries, getting her eggs developed. Once she is foraged for a certain period of time, she'll begin collecting paper fiber, wood fiber in order to produce the beginnings of her nests.

[00:09:52] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:52] Back up a second. What does she eat? 

[00:09:56] Megan Asche: [00:09:56] Oh, she eats nectar. 

[00:09:57] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:09:57] Oh really? [00:10:00] Okay. She takes a little bit of fiber and she starts a little, you could keep going. 

[00:10:03] Megan Asche: [00:10:03] Yeah. So she starts her nest and it begins with a little tiny petiole or like a stem attached to some sort of a surface. And that could be your home, that could be part of a tree, that could be even a stem of like a woodier bushier plant. And once the stem is made, she begins making a single cell and then another cell and another cell and the cells are hexagonal just like a honeybee nest. And she'll begin laying eggs and once the eggs are laid, she now is doing a little bit of forging still - she's got to consume a certain amount of calories. But once the nest is produced, most of her responsibility is actually just staying on that nest, protecting it, keeping it relatively warm. What's interesting about Polistes paper wasps, which is different than some social insect species, is that Polistes paper wasps will either begin a colony as a single queen or a cohort of [00:11:00] multiple mated queens.

[00:11:01] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:11:01] Really?

[00:11:02] Megan Asche: [00:11:02] Yeah. And the queens don't have to be related to each other. But they'll start the nest together as a cooperative, but ultimately the larger or more dominant queen will become the alpha queen - and she gets to lay the eggs and the other queens will become beta queens or subordinate queens. So because of this weird system of multiple queens and the lack of differentiation physically between the queens and the workers - even though paper wasps are considered eusocial, they're considered sort of primitively eusocial. Because that sociality isn't as strictly defined as there would be in a bumblebee colony, yellow jacket colony, honeybee colony, ant colony - that sort of thing.

[00:11:44] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:11:44] Well that sort of answers the question I really wanted to ask you about is, I noticed being somebody who's come through the honeybee world, and you go to the social insect meetings - there are whole sections of people who are studying Polistes wasps. I guess part of it is, [00:12:00] it really does sort of sit at the crux of social behavior and its evolution. Tell us a little bit more about this field - I'm barely aware of it, but I know it exists and I know people really love studying this wasp. 

[00:12:14] Megan Asche: [00:12:14] Well, it's interesting because yeah, you're right. It's kind of at a transition point in levels of sociality, they fit the primary three requirements of a eusocial insect, meaning that their reproductive division of labor is present, they have overlapping generations and they've cooperative brood care. But they don't have a lot of like the cool, sexier parts of being social - like you're not seeing awesome, like warriors with big horns and you're not seeing like any sort of like very, very distinctive like responsibilities within the worker caste.

[00:12:51] That kind of thing that you're seeing in other groups and you're like, "man, that's really, really interesting." It kind of feels almost more like a co-op where there's a queen and then there's [00:13:00] workers, but there's a level of flexibility there that you don't see in some social groups. And depending upon the colony and depending upon how many queens that are inseminated started the colony, you could see things like an alpha queen dying and a beta queen taking over. Which is different than some social insects. 

[00:13:18] So what's also interesting and one of the other reasons why they're a very, very attractive system to study is because you think about the design of the nest. So the nest for paper wasps, which I didn't mention earlier is once they start that little petiole and those cells, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger throughout the colony season, but it always is kind of on a plane. So it's just one comb and the comb is exposed - it doesn't have an envelope meaning that it doesn't have like that paper shield that covers things like yellow jacket nests. So as a researcher, you can do very little manipulation and actually just sit there and watch them do their thing. It's not like [00:14:00] honeybees where you're like, "oh, I gotta build an observation hive, I got to figure out a way to actually get in there and see what's going on."

[00:14:04] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:14:04] You can see everything? 

[00:14:05] Megan Asche: [00:14:05] It's open, it's exposed. Like you could theoretically just paint the queen and let her do her thing. And you'll always know where she's at and what she's doing and all the workers that are there. And you can count the number of cells and actually track colony development throughout the season. It's a very transparent system, they are very easy to monitor. 

[00:14:25] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:14:25] I have two quick questions. The first one, how big do these nests get before they finish the cycle? 

[00:14:30] Megan Asche: [00:14:30] That's a really, really good question. So here the Pacific Northwest, you'd be hard pressed to find a colony that had more than, I don't know, 50 -  that would be a huge paper wasp colony to have that many workers on at one point. A lot of my research is actually done down at Florida where I'll actually travel down there to collect nests there. You're going to see wasp nest that are at least twice that size, but it's still, it's very, very small. Very, very small, especially in comparison to something like yellow jackets, which could have hundreds or [00:15:00] thousands of individual workers at any one time, or a honeybee colony, which can have 20,000 to 50,000 individuals at one time. So it's a pretty small group. 

[00:15:08] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:15:08] The other thing is whenever I've encountered them they're really gentle. Like they really don't freak out, they kind of hide or cower. Is that normal?

[00:15:20] Megan Asche: [00:15:20] Yeah, so paper wasps exhibit very distinct defensive behavior and they'll do defensive behavior way before they even think about flying off the nest and stinging you or getting close. So what you'll see is things like, vibrating of the wings, posturing with their abdomen sticking up in the air, like kind of like a prancing around the nest, like trying to make themselves as visible as possible so that you don't want to get anywhere near them. And they don't have to get off of the nest. 

[00:15:49] So for myself, coming from a research background with honeybees, it's a very, very different defensive system. I mean, if you think about it, honeybees have whole bunch of workers that they've got [00:16:00] as part of their team, there's a large defensive structure there. So if honeybees need to, they can fly out and sting you if they have to. We've got a very small colony system here with paper wasps, every individual is incredibly valuable. So for myself, when I go out and I collect live wasps, which I have to do for my behavior research, I will collect whole nests.

[00:16:21] So I will actually go out there and extract an entire nest with all of the workers on it, bring them back to the lab and use them for experimentation. Do I get stung a lot? Nope! I wear a bee jacket the same way I would if I was beekeeping. But what I tell people is that when you work honeybees and you get an angry colony, they might follow you out of the yard. Like it might take a while for you to finally shake them all off - if you've upset them in some way. 

[00:16:48] For paper wasps, it almost feels like somebody just took a handful of jelly beans and just threw them at your mask and then they're gone. They have an initial attack and then they bolt [00:17:00] and you don't see them anywhere - they will just disappear. And then if you go back later to where the nest was, all the ones that disappeared will be there trying to rebuild the nest and you could collect them later. But like there's one initial sort of attack and that's it. 

[00:17:16] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:17:16] Okay. That's fascinating. I know what I was gonna ask you, so you talked about like, often with a lot of these social insects they're really hard to study outside of their context. But you talked about picking up the nest and establishing it in a place like, presumably like in a lab?

[00:17:41] Megan Asche: [00:17:41] Oh, yeah. So I personally don't do that. I do know people that do actually maintain paper wasp colonies, either in a cube, like a bug dorm or in a greenhouse. But the way I handle my research is I'm not looking at colony development - so I don't need to maintain the colony with the [00:18:00] same working structure it was to begin with. I collect live wasps and I try to run behavior research on them as quickly as I possibly can - so they are as close to their normal kind of behaviors as they can be. And I'm running tests on individual adults. So what I do is I collect a bunch of wasps, so typically the lab I maintain between five hundred and twenty-five hundred live wasps that I'm caring for.

[00:18:26] Once I collect the nest I put them in the fridge for a little while, slow them down. And then using like forceps, we'll sort them by species and by sex. And then all of them of the same species in the same caste go into a bug dorm and they all cohabitate. And that's the other thing that is kind of interesting to talk to people about when it comes to paper wasps is that it's a mixed box. So it's all different nests, all different families, not necessarily sister colonies - and they cohabitate very, very peacefully. 

[00:18:57] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:18:57] Cohabitate means like rear a [00:19:00] nest together?

[00:19:01] Megan Asche: [00:19:01] No, meaning that they can live together in captivity with no aggression and they will live that way peacefully as adults for as long as I pretty much want to keep them.

[00:19:12] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:19:12] Well, perfect. That sets things up really nicely for us to talk about your research. So let's take a quick break. We'll come back and let's dive deep into the research you're doing on Polistes wasps.

[00:19:25] Okay, we are back. So we heard about you with these fridges full of different Polistes wasps the different species, and you're making trips to Florida. What on earth is going on? What's your project all about? 

[00:19:38] Megan Asche: [00:19:38] So my project is really interesting and very, very unique. So WSU where I am currently a graduate student, we're dealing mostly with agricultural based research. My research is kind of way out of left field, but it's a legacy project that was originally started with alumni from WSU. So my boss, Peter Landolt, who recently passed away [00:20:00] last December, he was a WSU alumni and he actually worked with the very famous Roger Akre on yellow jackets while he was here doing his PhD. After he completed his PhD, he started a career with the United States Department of Agriculture, which went from California to Florida, back to Washington State. While he was in Florida, he worked at the office in Gainesville, and while he was in Gainesville, he got a request for help from NASA. 

[00:20:25] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:20:25] From NASA?

[00:20:27] Megan Asche: [00:20:27] Yeah, from NASA, what was going on is that at NASA, at Cape Canaveral, they were experiencing problems with paper wasps swarming the launch towers on the facility. So they were getting these huge wasp populations and they wanted somebody from the United States Department of Agriculture to come out there - try to figure out what's going on and help provide them with some advice on how to control them. So, totally weird. And so Peter Landolt and his friend, Dr. Hal Reed, who was also a WSU [00:21:00] alumni - started a road trip around Florida in like 1990. 

[00:21:05] So they're going from different large tower structures in Florida, all over the state collecting paper wasps, and trying to determine what species are swarming at these towers and what's the actual cycle. So when are they showing up? When are they leaving? What castes are there? And what Pete and Hal found out is that there was a whole bunch of paper wasps coming to these towers in Florida around October. And what you'd see is males, so these males would start swarming the towers and they would be performing what is essentially a lekking behavior. So if you're familiar with bird behavior research, you know, the idea of a lek. 

[00:21:41] So these males are coming in these towers and essentially establishing a territory where they land at different areas and defend their little spots. But the paper waps actually do this for like a month. So the males will be there for a month before these new queens that need to mate, even show up. Yes, [00:22:00] the males are just hanging out. And so the once the queen show up the males and the queens mate and the males die, which is now kind of a very typical social Hymenoptera cycle. And now these new queens, which are mated, instead of leaving, will actually stay at the tower, hibernate on the towers, or they'll try to get in the towers and hibernate inside, and they hibernate in clusters. 

[00:22:25] So it's not just like one wasp stuck on a window -  it's hundreds of wasps cuddling together on the side of these buildings or trying to get inside the buildings. And this actually creates a serious problem depending upon what the towers are. So my research is funded by the United States Air Force, which has a problem with these wasps because they're clustering on air control towers, and they're getting into really expensive equipment and breaking it. 

[00:22:52] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:22:52] I'll be darned.

[00:22:53] Megan Asche: [00:22:53] So my research is a legacy of this original research, which was published in 1991 with Hal Reed and Peter [00:23:00] Landolt. And what we're trying to do is develop kind of unique ways of controlling paper wasp populations. And the reason why it's kind of a unique problem is that we have yellow jacket traps on the market - they use heptyl butyrate, which is an attractant inside of them and it works pretty darn well. That chemical does not attract Polistes paper wasps. 

[00:23:19] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:19] What is the chemical mimicking?

[00:23:21] Megan Asche: [00:23:21] I believe it's a sex pheromone. 

[00:23:24] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:24] Okay, so they've got this chemical in the traps and we've seen them, those yellow traps.

[00:23:29] Megan Asche: [00:23:29] It's the main chemical that's used in almost all the commercial traps. 

[00:23:32] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:32] Okay, so some graduate students sometime figured this out that this was an attractant and it's been in the traps but it doesn't work for Polistes? 

[00:23:40] Megan Asche: [00:23:40] No, no. It works for yellow jackets. 

[00:23:42] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:23:42] Okay. 

[00:23:43] Megan Asche: [00:23:43] So what I'm doing is, I come from a lab, so Peter my advisor was primarily a chemical ecologist, so he was very interested in isolating chemicals and building lures for them for commercial purposes. While I am working [00:24:00] on a project derived from his work, I'm not a chemical ecologist, I'm more of an ethologist. I'm curious about how well paper wasps can learn.

[00:24:08] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:08] What is an ethologist?

[00:24:10] Megan Asche: [00:24:10] Behavioral scientist. 

[00:24:11] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:11] Okay. Gotcha. Alright, thanks. 

[00:24:12] Megan Asche: [00:24:12] So, what I'm looking at is actually the associative learning behavior of paper wasps, which is a very basic scientific concept. I almost say like it's like the Pavlov dogs of wasps, where what I'm doing is essentially taking these wasps who receive a very neutral food product normally, which is unscented sugar water and regular water. And I'm inoculating that sugar water with an odor and exposing it to them for only 24 hours. And then after that 24 hour exposure time, I'm trying to measure how attracted they are to that odor. So how quickly were they able to associate an odor that they haven't experienced before with that food reward?

[00:24:54] And the idea is that eventually if we find out that [00:25:00] this is an effective way of teaching these animals to associate in odor with a food reward, perhaps instead of using something like a sticky trap, or still trying to use a cylindrical yellow jacket traps which you already know don't work - maybe we could be setting up some sort of a bait station in order to attract and manage these populations at the towers. 

[00:25:19] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:25:19] Okay. So the ideal compound for you is something that they're very attracted to, but that they learn quickly and they are like, "I need more of that."

[00:25:28] Megan Asche: [00:25:28] Yes, absolutely. So one of the ways we're kind of ensuring that is the types of chemicals that we're using right now are chemicals that can be found in plants. So we already know that they forage on flowers. So we're trying to find floral type of odors that they should be able to smell naturally. Because just like us insects they can't smell everything. They're not sensitive to all types of odors. 

[00:25:53] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:25:53] Can you back up a second? You did mention, early on in the interview that when the queens come out they feed [00:26:00] on nectar. That's one of the main sources of getting energy to juice up their ovaries and get ready. So you'll see these on flowers for one thing and what else do they like to eat? 

[00:26:14] Megan Asche: [00:26:14] So adult paper wasps will feed on nectar their entire life. So it's not just queens, it's also the workers and a lot of males. You'll actually see in the fall season, when the males are active, you'll see a lot of males on flowers. And like I said earlier they have very, very long curly antenna. It's really easy to tell what which caste you're looking at. 

[00:26:35] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:26:35] Okay.

[00:26:36] Megan Asche: [00:26:36] But anyway, so besides the nectar, paper wasps consume live insect prey. So, the adults which have that nice constricted wasp waist might, you know, chew up the insect a little bit and enjoy a little bit of that insect juice, but they are not consuming the larger, like crunchier parts of the [00:27:00] insect - they can't digest that type of food. However, they'll actually take insect prey and bring it back to the nest and feed that to the larva. Wasp larva have a fully, sclerotized head, unlike something like a honeybee where they've got a soft little body and all they can do is just kind of like swim around and slurp sweet juices. The actual wasp larva, they have like mandibles - like they can actually chew up crunchy food. So that most of that insect prey is actually coming back to the nest if he feeds the immatures. 

[00:27:35] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:27:35] Okay. So that's fascinating. So this is the reason why floral odors make a lot of sense in your research, because that is the major source of food for the adults. And the males, for example, who are you're really trying to find. Okay. Alright, cool. So how's it going? 

[00:27:52] Megan Asche: [00:27:52] It's going really, really well. So, one of the interesting things that we're seeing is not only are the wasps capable of [00:28:00] associating a unique odor with a food reward very quickly. So like I said earlier, they're only getting a 24 hour exposure time, but even in that 24 hours - they’re learning, "wow if I smell this, I'm going to get something great." But what's interesting is we've got distinct castes within Polistes wasp, just like you have distinct castes in honeybees and bumblebees. So the way that my research is being performed is I'm actually isolating the distinct castes, which I collected different times of the year.

[00:28:31] So I can kind of ensure that I'm getting the correct caste and then testing them individually. So I'm isolating a species and a caste and running all the experiments and then a few months, same species, different castes after a few months, same species, different castes. So when I run these experiments, the interesting results I'm getting aren't that a lot of the wasps are capable of learning - it's that different castes are better at learning [00:29:00] than others. So the spring queens, which are initiating the nests and the workers, both of which have to forage for multiple types of resources are really, really good at associating those odors with the food reward. 

[00:29:13] The males which don't have to provide any sort of forage or bring back any sort of resources back to the nest in the fall, they are only interested in essentially eating, taking care of themselves and then hooking up and then hibernating - they aren't very good learners. So there's actually a difference in the ability to associate a odor with the food reward, depending upon the caste. And this is the most interesting thing we're coming up with right now.

[00:29:43] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:29:43] And this is consistent across the species?

[00:29:46] Megan Asche: [00:29:46] Yeah. 

[00:29:47] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:29:47] Wow. That's a great finding, an amazing finding. Tell me how that makes sense. 

[00:29:53] Megan Asche: [00:29:53] Yeah, it makes sense with their behaviors, because if you think about which of these castes are actually going out and foraging for [00:30:00] food, and actually would have to be discriminating about what kind of food products they're bringing back - it would be the workers and the spring queens. Because the spring queens are doing a lot of the same tasks the workers are doing until the first factual worker shows up and she can just focus on laying eggs. So they're very, very similar in comparison to the fall gions or queens and the males. 

[00:30:24] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:30:24] Oh, that those are great findings. The other question I have is, I guess the ideal compound would be one that attracts everything. Are they very species specific in their preferences or in their learning? 

[00:30:39] Megan Asche: [00:30:39] You know, I haven't found that at this point. 

[00:30:41] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:30:41] Okay. 

[00:30:41] Megan Asche: [00:30:41] So right now I'm only testing three odors - even with just three odors the volume of the project is astronomical. So I'm going out, I'm collecting live animals, I'm taking care of the live animals, I'm [00:31:00] inoculating them. So I'm creating a control group and a treatment group, and then I'm running them individually through a flight tunnel in order to run these behavior experiments. So in a single day, I can only test about thirty-six wasps and every experiment requires seventy-two. So I'm racking up numbers so fast.

[00:31:23] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:31:23] So folks in a few years when you get these Polistes wasp traps, just appreciate this. 

[00:31:30] Megan Asche: [00:31:30] Absolutely. 

[00:31:32] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:31:32] Okay. So the other thing I just wanted to sort of remark on, is, Peter Landolt is a huge figure in the Pacific Northwest and he passed away recently. At ESA this year they're going to be organizing a session. Tell us a little bit about that session. 

[00:31:52] Megan Asche: [00:31:52] Yeah so I think everybody's pretty disappointed that we're not going to be able to be in person. But I think ESA made a really good, safe [00:32:00] decision to have the conferences here be all digital. And I'm hoping that that allows for participation from people that wouldn't necessarily get to participate otherwise. So my advisor, Dr. Peter Landolt passed away in December of this year and it was a complete surprise to the entire community and my friend, Dr. Rob Mahar who works at the USC office in Gainesville and I are putting together a memorial symposium for Pete. And I'm hoping to get as many people to attend digitally as we possibly can. And what's cool about it is, Peter was a chemical ecologist and he worked on a whole bunch of systems. 

[00:32:39] Specifically he was interested in solving agricultural problems, but he worked with Coleoptera’s, Lepidoptera’s and Hymenoptera’s and because he had such a large network where we've been able to call on a bunch of different types of people to talk about their research for the symposia. And we're going to be looking at people that are all different stages of their career from emeritus [00:33:00] level kind of professors, all the way to graduate students. So it's cool. It's a really neat diversity. And it's also a lot of national diversity because Pete traveled a lot when he was kind of like at the beginning of his USDA career. So he's got contacts all throughout the continental United States. So it's a really interesting group of people and it should be a really nice symposia.

[00:33:18] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:33:18] Fantastic. And I know there's just a call for papers and stuff are just coming out. So as you prepare for Entomological Society of America this year -  I'm going to definitely attend this sounds like a fascinating symposium. Okay. Well, we have one last section. It's not that scary. It's the question period. So let's take a quick break. We'll come back and I've got three questions for you that we ask all our guests.

[00:33:48] Okay. So we are back. I am so excited to have you at this session. We've never had a wasp person before, this is like whole new territory. And so firstly, I'm really [00:34:00] excited about is your book recommendation. For all of us out there really curious about wasps, what do you got for us?

[00:34:13] Megan Asche: [00:34:13] Okay. So I got a couple of answers because I think that you know, as entomologists, we have different kinds of needs and we have different levels of interest in these subjects. So if I was going to pick a general book for learning about both social and solitary wasps that kind of gives you the best ground floor, I would pick Philip Spradbery's "Wasps'' published in 1973. It's a thick book, but you know what? It's only $25 if you get it used online. So J. Philips Spradbery is the author of this book and it is a really, really good like general survey of life history information and biology of [00:35:00] wasps. So that would be my number one recommendation if you're getting into wasps and you want something to like get some really good general knowledge, that would be the book I'd go to first.

[00:35:11] So the next book, if you are a casual interest in wasp and you just want to learn about wasps researchers and kind of like the different types of ways people study them, I would go with Howard Ensign Evans, "The Wasp Farm." And "The Wasp Farm", which was published in 1985 talks about Evans' property, like the place where he lived and all the wasps that lived there and all the animals that he studied, and it documents like the individual life stages. It's definitely more of a natural history book, but way smaller and kind of like a really cool, like take it on an airplane, remind yourself of why we love entomology and like really, like dig into somebody's passion. 

[00:35:51] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:35:51] I'm looking forward to that. That's great.

[00:35:54] Megan Asche: [00:35:54] For [00:36:00] identification purposes, I would start with, if you're doing yellow jackets, "The Yellow Jackets of America, North of Mexico." And so this is a book that was written by Roger Acre, who was a WSU alumni. And my former adviser, Dr. Peter Landell co-authored it when he was a student here at Columbia in the 1980s.

[00:36:24] So if you need to identify yellow jackets in the continental United States, this is the book to go for. Beautiful prints.