The Bug Lady

Velvet Ant

Hymenoptera is the order of all of those ant, wasp, bee looking bugs, including the weirder ones like wood wasps and sawflies. Then, inside of this order there is the superfamily Vespoidea. Both ants and velvet ants are in this subfamily.

BUT, ants are in the family Formicidae, and velvet ants have their very own family, Mutillidae. So velvet ants are not ants at all. In fact, they have more wasp characteristics than ant characteristics.

For example, they have a VERY painful sting. Ha, I don’t know this one from experience. When you hear about something having a sting painful enough to kill a cow, you don’t go and try it! Though maybe I should, just to find out if it really hurts that much, or if the people who were stung just happened to be weaklings.

Another similarity is that they are parasites to other insects. They larvae eat pretty much everything that they can catch, including ants, beetles, flies, cockroaches, termites, butterflies, and even bees and wasps. The thick hairs that give them their popular name helps them stay protected from the stings as they invade nests and plant their eggs near the larvae.

In Brazil, their popular name is formiga feiticeira (Portuguese for witch ant), because apparently they used to be used in spells to make somebody fall in love with you. I wonder if that involved getting stung. No thanks!

Velvet Ant by The Bug Lady, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Arthropod, Brazilian, cow ant, cow killer, entomology, Hymenoptera, Insect, Mutillidae, Photographs, velvet ant, wasp