The name ‘Parasitic Wasps’ is unnecessarily terrifying, because the truth is that the presence of these bugs around your home might be both an indicator of an outbreak of pests threatening the health of your lawn, and a surefire sign that Mother Nature is stepping in to naturally manage their population.
Ask anyone who is passionate about their grass and they’ll tell you that their number one fear isn’t the postman riding over their lawn, or even Bindi popping up in Summer. It’s the constant fear that underneath the surface, lawn pests might be getting out of control and threatening to destroy their entire green patch of paradise!
For this reason, we control lawn pests and grubs throughout the year through products like Acelepryn – an important distinction is that we control their populations instead of trying to eradicate them, because their presence is an important part of the overall lawn biology.
However, when the populations of common pests like African Black Beetle or Armyworm get out of control the results can be devastating, and for the most part these subterranean critters keep their potential for chaos largely to themselves.
But there’s one key indicator as to the population of pests living below your lush green lawn, and that can be the presence of Parasitic Wasps.
Parasitic Wasps are a natural form of pest management, and pose no direct threat to the health of your lawn. Identifiable by their orange and red or black and blue torsos, these wasps are actually seeking out the pests in your lawn to lay their eggs in.
The wasp uses live prey as an incubator for her eggs, killing the beetle when they hatch. For this reason, Parasitic Wasps are actually used in some agricultural sectors as an active pest management strategy.
In the instance of your home lawn, the wasps are drawn to your lawn due to the number of viable hosts lurking below the surface. When the pests surface, the wasps hijack the bugs and use them as an incubator for their eggs. The wasp larvae become a parasite of the lawn bug, and eventually kill it before they hatch.
While we’ve been conditioned to see wasps as aggressive predators with a painful sting, Parasitic Wasps pose little to no threat to us, unless they’re repeatedly provoked. Even then, their sting is a minor inconvenience and certainly not as threatening to us as it is to a lawn bug!
While certain insecticides are effective at managing Parasitic Wasps, their role as natural lawn pest managers is far too vital to worry about decimating their populations; especially considering they pose no threat to us. Accept their presence as a sign of a functioning and healthy lawn ecosystem.
As we strive for the ultimate home lawn, it’s refreshing to know that there’s a natural helper alerting us to the presence of pests and bugs threatening the health of our grass. Keep a casual eye on the presence of Parasitic Wasps as an indicator as to Black Beetle and Armyworm populations, and accept them as a perfectly functional part of a healthy ecosystem.
