Wasp
The largest social wasp is the Asian giant hornet, at up to in length. The various tarantula hawk wasps are of a similar size and can overpower a spider many times its own weight, and move it to its burrow, with a sting that is excruciatingly painful to humans. The solitary giant scoliid, "Megascolia procer", with a wingspan of 11.5 cm, has subspecies in Sumatra and Java; it is a parasitoid of the Atlas beetle "Chalcosoma atlas". The female giant ichneumon wasp "Megarhyssa macrurus" is long including its very long but slender ovipositor which is used for boring into wood and inserting eggs. The smallest wasps are solitary chalcid wasps in the family Mymaridae, including the world's smallest known insect, "Dicopomorpha echmepterygis" (139 micrometres long) and "Kikiki huna" with a body length of only 158 micrometres, the smallest known flying insect.
Polistes canadensis
Both male and female "Polistes canadensis" have a uniformly light to dark mahogany-brown body, sometimes with the head and thorax of a lighter shade. Its rust colored body gives the red paper wasp its common name. Some feature a yellow apical margin of the first tergum as well. The wings are purplish black, and the veins and stigma are either black or reddish brown. The "Polistes canadensis" is a large-bodied wasp with a wing length ranging from 17.0 to 24.5 mm.
Nests are constructed from plant fibers such as dry grass and dead wood, which like in other paper wasps, that they mix with saliva to create water-resistant nests made out of papery material. These nests are not covered with an envelope and feature hexagonal cells in which eggs are laid and larvae develop. The "Polistes canadensis" colony divides its colony among several combs, with an average size of 30.8 cells per comb. A large, mature but still growing colony has about 838 cells distributed among 38 combs. Combs on vertical (walls and tree trunks) and sloping surfaces (tree limbs) hang with the petiole at the upper end. Colonies on tree trunks tend to add secondary combs above or below the first comb resulting in a linear arrangement. In contrast, nests on horizontal surfaces away from edges (i.e. ceilings) feature eccentric petioles with secondary combs bordering the central primary comb in a semicircular perimeter. No comb has more than one petiole. Petioles average 9.9 mm in length. When combs reach their final size, adult wasps can often step directly from one comb to another; the average distance between petioles of nearby combs is 2.9 cm. Although rare, adjacent combs sometimes grow to touch.