Vulgaris

Its been a few months and the first of this generation are starting to reach adult hood. I saw a newly molted female yesterday. There is an overwhelming number of them now_ must be a hundred or more. You guys WOULD NOT BELIEVE how much food they go through every night. Handfuls and handfuls of fishfood, chicken food, and fresh apple go into the cage every night and it is all gone by morning As to if I am able to keep this colony much longer, I doubt it. I'm going back to school next month and mom refuses to take care of them again. Even if she did agree, the numbers are so large they would be unmanageable for her. So hopefully if I release 3/4 of them, she will take care of them for me and they can re populate

I've always found nymphs of Parcoblatta living in the nest boxes of my Vespula colonies. In fact this past week there was one actually sitting on top of the nest in the folds of the envelope. I think they just take advantage of the shelter and feed on the waste from the colonies

I'm home for the summer now and most of the adults in my colony have died off. There are still occasional adult females but no males. There are a lot of sub adult numphs, and TONS of hatchlings. I would go as far as saying maybe a few hundred. This is just one of the 4 egg crates...

All of the pennsylvanica females have wings like that. I've never seen one with short wings. I honestly don't know about the ID of the others. There are lots of different possibilities of which none can be really proven without an expert I think I saw some nymphs hatching yesterday. Unfortunately I had to leave though. 4 more weeks until I will be home for the summer. The enclosure was crawling with nymphs though!

I got to check on the colony today. All the males are now gone. There are just females, nymphs, and hatchlings left now. Yes, I did see some new born nymphs in the tank!! woo! And the bottom of the cage is littered with all different kinds of oothecae. And here are 3 different females which happened to be together for a good photo. There is still another kind of orange one in there which I havn't photographed

The die off of the males has begun. I came home today for mother's birthday and I checked on the roaches. I removed all these dead males from the floor of the colony. Not a single dead female, and about 50% of the females are carrying a oothecae.

Nah they are pretty darn small. Especially the females

I already did. We apparently need a microscope to see the hairs. They were not visible to the naked eye, and do not show up in my photo that I got

More pics while I am home! I'm sure you hate to hear it, but I have been feeding off a few males each day. There are just so many of them that it is probably healthy for the colony to get rid of a few Both species are reproducing, and there are still plenty of nymphs! Here is a male and female of the orange variety. The female has an ootheca

a few chaotic males slipped out when I opened the lid to feed them yesterday. My anoles thoroughly enjoyed them

I'm not sure what factors control the wing length I lifted up the food dish today to find all of these beauties

Home for spring break. The roaches are seriously too much for the size of enclosure. They can't possibly keep multiplying with that high of a pop density. There are plenty of orange females and males, so they have their own population too There are various colors of oothecae that I can see buried in the bottom Here is the female that I found in my spare room a while back. she has matured and is larger than all the other females. The wings are also shaped differently

They were both put in the same order for some reason (Blattodea )

Congratulations! That is a major accomplishment.

Awesome! I got to observe a mating frenzy tonight, and I found out how they court. I always wondered about it, and was actually going to post a question about how the males go about courting. Well, I answered my own question! You guys are probably getting sick of the updates. It will stop once I go back to school tomorrow. lol http://bugguide.net/node/view/488834 & here's a photo of the food dish after dark. The adult males really are not interested much in eating

The males are ridiculously active! They are running around the cage like nuts. Flying from side to side too. In this video you can see two flights if you watch close

By the way vfox, I tried to replicate what you had done to manually spread the wings of the males. How did you hold the wings and take the photo at the same time? I wish I had a third arm, lol. I had to ask my dad to take photos while I held them

Here is a male and female from the main colony (in other words they are offspring of the original two parents) http://bugguide.net/node/view/488737 Here is the large brown colored male http://bugguide.net/node/view/485740 And here is one of the little orange males http://bugguide.net/node/view/488742 I will be feeding them some apple later tonight, so I will get more photos of the entire colony then. By the way, there are still many nymphs left! They really need a bigger cage, lol. I can't believe how many of them there are. No sign of oothecae yet though

Just got home! I'm pretty much overwhelmed by the amount of adults in there! There's orange ones and black ones and brown ones... all sorts! Lots of mature females too. The female which I found in my spare room in December is a last instar nymph, and she is definitely something different! Can't wait till she's an adult

what started out as wasps for me has turned into all sorts of bugs, including roaches! Wasps are still the main focus though. Vfox: With larger colonies, water and food are replaced at night. Obviously yellowjacket colonies cannot be held captive for their entire life cycle, and are turned loose after the first workers emerge. Taming the queen from the beginning will ultimately lead to a non aggressive colony that is easy to work with Males need to leave in order to prevent inbreeding. If you leave them in the enclosure, all of your new queens will be inbred which is very bad. The females also give the signal when it's time for them to leave by biting at their legs What you are probably referring to is Polistes fuscatus (one of the most abundant eastern wasps) and Polistes dominula (now extremely abundant non native). dominula is black and yellow and most people refer to it as a "yellowjacket" in general terms

Wasps and bees are actually my main interest. I live to work with them, and they are my passion. Thread wasted wasps are solitary wasps, each species with a different kind of life cycle. And there is an extreme variety of species, so they are near impossible to rear in captivity

A somewhat outdated cage for subterranean nesting yellowjackets. I have since designed a better model

Life of a captive Paper wasp nest:

For those of you interested in my rearing projects with various types of Vespids, you may want to dig through my youtube channel a little. These videos show the jist of it Basic Paper wasp cage setup:

I might as well just post it in the General section whenever I get time if more than one person is interested. Might be a little bit though, I am so busy lately it is just ridiculous