A velvet ant is actually a wasp, they look like hairy ants, and though they aren’t considered aggressive, their defense is a formidable sting. The solitary creatures live a few months to a year. These are very neat insects as the velvet ant lays her eggs in the den of ground-nesting wasps or bees. When the young velvets hatch, they feed on the developing forms of their unsuspecting neighbors. As far as nightmares go, this one is creepy. The velvet ant parasitizes a cicada killer wasp that – as the name implies – already has parasitized a cicada. These wasps are haplodiploidy, a sex-determination system in which males develop from unfertilized eggs and are haploid, and females develop from fertilized eggs and are diploid.
