Anyone who has ever visited my website must have known that the main objects of my photographic interest are birds, which I have been doing for almost 45 years. However, trips to find interesting bird models require more and more time spent in the field. Since lately my free time is getting rarer, but I didn’t want to give up nature photography, I turned my attention a little lower. I looked under my feet and discovered an incredible world of insects.

The country I live in is called Czech Paradise. It is a place of countless rocky sandstone mazes, basalt igneous rocks and pine forests. We can find many unique locations here, places that are not found anywhere else. And in these places we can also find very interesting animals bound to sandy and very dry and warm places.

Especially on the southern slopes, one of them is a small wasp with the warning name Oxybellus argentatus. Like any proper wasp, this little wasp also has a sting. But he doesn’t use it to attack people or other intruders. On the contrary, one could say that she is almost friendly to people, or at least they are completely stolen from her. Their body length is 6 to 10 mm, so they could easily escape our attention. However, if you pay attention to where you step when walking along the sandy footpaths of the Bohemian Paradise in the summer in June to August, you can observe these wasps flying very nimbly and then running on the ground right on the way, as it happened to me in the Prachovské skály and disappears in a few seconds in the dug-out corridor.

When digging, it uses a quick synchronized movement of the front legs with a characteristically raised rear, so as not to interfere with throwing grains of sand backwards. Some of them make a ball out of the dug-up material already in the corridor, which they carry outside behind with their front legs and only then put the material there. You will rarely find a corridor of only one thistle. It almost always creates so-called nest aggregations, and several wasps dig corridors in a suitable place.

Many types of hymenoptera insects, to which Oxybelus also belongs, have a so-called parasitoid mode of development. This means that her egg is laid on paralyzed prey, most often Diptera flies of the genus Acrosathe. This live preserve is carried by the female swollen on the stinger into a pre-excavated nest. Some females even dig the passage even with a fly on the stinger. However, many details about the bionomics of this species are still unknown.

In the Czech Republic, Oxybelus are a relatively rare species, as the map of its distribution shows. Due to its habitat requirements for loose sandy terrain, the species is very local and is considered an endangered species in our country.