eTawau > Insects of Borneo > Wasps

Wasps of Tawau and Borneo

Hunters, parasitoids and pollinators — the wasps photographed for this site, with the date and place wherever they were recorded

Most people meet wasps as the paper wasps that build nests under the eaves and sting when disturbed. They are a tiny part of the story. Most wasps live alone, never sting people, and spend their lives hunting other insects to feed their young, or laying eggs inside them. Some are smaller than a grain of rice and pollinate fig trees. Wasps belong to the order Hymenoptera, with the bees and ants: insects with two pairs of wings, the hind pair smaller and hooked to the front pair in flight, and a narrow waist between the thorax and the abdomen.

Field records

Dated and placed, each on its own page and on iNaturalist.

14 September 2008 · 1.56 pm · Bukit Gemok

A crown wasp on a fallen log

A slender black wasp with a round red head and a long black ovipositor standing on a fallen log
A female crown wasp (Stephanidae) on dead wood beside the George Mais Trail: round red head on a narrow neck, swollen hind thighs, and an ovipositor longer than her body, used to lay eggs through wood onto the grubs of wood-boring beetles.

26 June 2016 · 5.38 pm · the Semarak football fields

The wasp that looked like a fly

A sand wasp, yellow and black with smoky wings, at the mouth of its burrow in building sand
A sand wasp (Bembicini, probably Bembix) filmed digging its burrow in a heap of building sand in the Tawau River Triangle, and flying off again and again to hunt the flies she feeds her young on. With a short video.

Crown wasps

One crown wasp photographed against a white background from above and from below, side by side: a red head, black body and long legs, and a very long thin ovipositor trailing below.
One female crown wasp (Stephanidae), photographed in 2016 from above (left) and from below (right). Body 27 mm, ovipositor 32 mm, total 59 mm. The date and place where it was found were not recorded.

The 2016 photograph, taken against white from above and below, shows the build of the family better than any field photograph: the round red head, the long neck, the swollen hind thighs and the ovipositor, here 32 mm against a body of 27 mm. The ovipositor is for laying eggs in wood, not for stinging. For a crown wasp in the field, at work on a log, see the Bukit Gemok record above.

Other wasp pages

A tiny female fig wasp with clear wings and a long thin ovipositor on a pale stem, against blue, with a caption naming Ceratosolen fusciceps
Fig wasps — including Ceratosolen fusciceps, the 2.25 mm pollinator of Ficus racemosa, and the wasps of four other fig species.
A metallic green and blue wasp with red legs dragging a large brown cockroach by its antenna across concrete
The emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa — the jewel wasp that stings a cockroach into obedience and leads it home by the antenna.
A slender orange wasp with dark wings and a long thin ovipositor standing on pale concrete
An orange wasp from Semporna, 24 January 2013, with an ovipositor as long as its body. Not yet identified.

Waiting for a name

A reddish-brown wasp with a yellow band on its abdomen and dark folded wings, resting on a green stem
Photographed 31 March 2009, 6.09 pm. Place not recorded.
A wasp with a yellow-banded abdomen curled on a dry grass stem
Photographed 11 April 2006, 7.12 am. Place not recorded.

These two older photographs have no notes with them, so they stay here without a name. If the place can be remembered, they can be posted to iNaturalist and given pages of their own.

Most wasps will not sting you. The solitary hunting and parasitic wasps on this page are not aggressive and ignore people. Give a wide berth to paper wasp and hornet nests, which their owners do defend, and never handle a wasp.

About this page. Photographs by Wong Fook Yee. Dates and times are from the photographs' own camera data. Rewritten 1 October 2026; it replaces an older page of thumbnails.