After cutting down a dead bitternut hickory, I met these two neighbors who are helping me: They are black giant ichneumon wasps. The first picture shows the female laying an egg inside a large wood borer larva. The long black tube is over an inch long and around an hour is needed to send the egg down the tube and into the larva. The smaller wasp in the second picture is a male checking out the lady. Everyone dislikes the wood dust piles and lost wood from those large wood borers and this wasp hunts only those large wood borers. The long... ovipositor is required to reach down into the borer hole and kill the larva. The long... ovipositor has these wasps among the largest in the world by length.
That's totally amazing!! Thanks for the education if I didn't know and saw it I'd be a bit freaked out.
I saw several of those floating around some of my fresh cut wood pile last summer, it was a little off putting to see them until I took some pictures, asked a few questions & did some research.
It is a little weird to find a "giant" wasp in your home woods instead of some far off rain forest. The multiple tubes on the ovipositor are part of a drilling system which is capable of drilling through up to 4 inches of solid wood. The wasp uses sound and smell to locate the buried larva. A small version of all those oil drillers using seismic waves to locate and drill for oil.
