Long slender black and yellow male Ichneumon wasp? searching willow leaves

Long colourful possible male Ichneumon wasp foraging amongst willow leaves

I have a long backlog of material and films to put onto my website and I like to do a little research before I publish them. Plus I keep filming all sorts of garden wildlife to add to the list of material. Hence I filmed this in August 2015 and had no idea where to start looking to identify and write about it!  So where do you start? The web or course although I do have scores of books, and this beautiful specimen was certainly not in any of them. It does slightly resemble a black and yellow mud dauber wasp but lacks that extremely needle thin waist abdomen as seen on Sceliphron species nor does it have the bulbous rear end of some these species.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we have the Eumenes species of potter wasps. It did not fit the bill either.

Identity

Dr Jennifer Owen in her epic garden study, ‘The Ecology of a Garden’, (Cambridge University Press) something I read many years ago and still have a copy, noted no less than 533 species of Ichneumon wasps out of 2,028 species, as then recorded in Britain. It could well be a male Ichneumon wasp, although apparently, the female lacks the long ovipositor associated with such wasps, so as an amateur trying to identify Ichneumon wasps (and many other insect life identifications!) I will stick my neck out and say its possibly an Amblyteles armatorius but always happy to be corrected by someone who knows!

You may find it and other Ichneumon wasps using a very useful guide to them by the Natural History Museum. Either way to me it was beautiful in its own right!

Download 1903 published Ichneumonologia Brittanica for free here.  Be warned though it is a bit heavy!

Useful number of species list here by Dr Owen (1972-2001) from the Wildlife Gardening Forum

“I hope you enjoyed this film and article finding it interesting and useful. All my articles and videos, available free, are funded by my teaching and sales of my award-winning bumblebee nest boxes, solitary bee nest boxes, peanut bird feeders and other wildlife gardening products. Please help by spreading the word and forwarding this link to your friends and colleagues. https://nurturing-nature.co.uk Thank you.” George Pilkington

Thank you to Rory Dimond for pointing me in the right direction. He has a stunning collection of wildlife gardening and other photographs