Tiny Parasitic Wasps
While out gardening, I lopped off a branch and noticed it had a Preying Mantis egg case attached. I cut off the twig with the egg case and popped it in a container to see if any baby Mantis would hatch out.
A few days later, a heap of tiny parasitic wasps emerged from the egg case - but no Mantis to be seen. Most of the Mantis eggs must have been eaten by the wasp larvae. With the Mantis photo opportunity gone, might as well have a go at getting a shot of one of these tiny wasps. Here are the photos … (technical notes follow after the photos).
# 1 - Parasitic Wasps and the Mantis egg case in a container.
These guys are only a couple of mm long so special macro equipment is required. Unfortunately I don’t have a specialist macro lens. No need for a macro lens for this shot though - it was taken with a Pentax K100D digital SLR with standard 50mm Pentax f1.7 lens, but could have been taken with any digital camera.
# 2 - Took the container lid off - just had to hope I could get a few shots before they all flew away. Fortunately a few of them landed on the white paper used as background for first shot. Here is a macro shot of a female wasp with long egg laying tube (the ovipositor). She pokes the tube into the Mantis nest to lay eggs.
# 3 - Two males (presumably, from the lack of “tail”)
Equipment
The macro photos were taken with a Pentax M 50mm 1.7 standard lens and a set of three extension tubes (68mm total extension). the lens was reversed on the end of the extension tubes using a lens reversing ring. I focussed with lens stopped down to f11. A small LED light was used to assist with focus - the viewfinder was too dark otherwise. (Reversing the lens decouples the lens aperture mechanism, so you cannot use open aperture focusing unless you stop down manually - this is not very practical with a subject that is moving and jumping around).
Lighting was with a Pentax AF200T flash unit in manual mode.