While social wasps, like hornets and yellow jackets, garner most of the publicity (most of it negative), the vast majority of wasp species, including digger wasps, spider wasps, and mud-daubers, are solitary. Elegant in appearance and distinctive in their actions, solitary wasps have long fascinated observers and have been the subject of narratives by such naturalists and scientists as Jean Henri Fabre, Niko Tinbergen, and Howard Ensign Evans.

Each adult female solitary wasp forages alone and, if she builds a nest, it is occupied solely by herself and her own off-spring. Females use their stings mainly for hunting, rather than for defense, and exhibit a wide range of foraging and parental behaviors. Solitary wasps are of special interest to ethologists and evolutionary biologists.

Kevin M. O'Neill provides readable yet thorough accounts of the natural history of the major families of solitary wasps and also surveys the current state of scientific research on these insects. Numerous comprehensive tables of quantitative data serve as an excellent reference for biologists.

Topics covered in Solitary Wasps: Behavior and Natural History include:
-- classification of the solitary wasps and their relation to other Hymenoptera
-- foraging and nesting behaviors
-- mating and parental strategies
-- thermoregulation
-- natural enemies
-- defensive strategies
-- directions for future research

Solitary Wasps: Behavior and Natural History is the first general survey in more than 25 years to be dedicated to its subject and is the best place to turn for information about the biology and compelling behavior of these common insects.

Howard Evans was a brilliant ethologist and systematist for whom the joy of science included lying on his belly in some remote location, digging out and diagramming a wasp's nest. During his career, Evans described over 900 species and authored more than a dozen books, both technical and popular, on a wide range of entomological and natural history subjects. Upon his death in 2002, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, intended as an update (though not a revision) of his classic 1966 work, "The Comparative Ethology and Evolution of the Sand Wasps," Kevin O'Neill, Evans's former student and coauthor, has completed and enlarged Evans's manuscript, to provide coverage of all sand-wasp tribes in Evan's earlier book. The result is a tribe-by-tribe, species by species review of studies of the Bembicinae that have appeared over the last four decades. "The Sand Wasps: Natural History and Behavior" already has been hailed by specialists as a new bible for those working on solitary wasps and an essential reference for scientists more broadly interested in insect behavioral evolution.