Dasypoda hirtipes (FABRICIUS, 1793)

Excavator: Ground. Females nest gregariously in sandy, sparsely vegetated soils. Huge nesting aggregations have been found in Britain (e.g. c.1000 nets on a roadside verge in Dorset (S.P.M Roberts, pers. obs.)). In Bedfordshire, Chambers (1949) counted between 50 to 60 nesting burrows in an area about 20 m x 1 m.

In the early 1960's, (1963) discovered a large colony of this species in the Ulyanovsk region of European Russia. She calculated that the aggregation occupied 360,000 square metres and consisted of somewhere in the region of 7.56 million nests.

%LABEL% (%SOURCE%)