John E. Woodmansee Photo: Tobacco hornworm on a tomato plant that has been attacked by a parasitic Braconid wasp. The white capsules on its back are the pupal stage of the tiny wasp. Braconid larvae ...

I talked about your question with my friend Allan Felsot. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. He told me cocoons are mostly silk. But they’re usually made by moths. A butterfly ...

Question: A huge magnolia tree in my yard started blooming again this month. It bloomed profusely this spring, and I’ve never seen it bloom again in the fall. Someone told me that this means the tree ...

Larvae of some paper wasp species use mysteriously fluorescent silk to weave the container in which they mature to adulthood. By Cara Giaimo Adult paper wasps are capable builders, painstakingly mouth ...

Pesky wasps once fed upon the insects gorging on rotting dinosaur eggs some 70 million years ago, suggests a new finding of ancient wasp cocoons hidden inside the fossilized egg of a titanosaur ...

Bacteria live in, on and around us and other organisms with sometimes very beneficial results. For the first time scientists have shown that one species of insect deliberately cultivates bacteria in ...

In 2019, researchers exploring the southwest coast of Portugal made an unexpected discovery: Hundreds of well-preserved bees had been mummified inside their cocoons for the last 2,975 years. They ...