Pollination is an important ecosystem service and facilitates the reproduction of many plants in native and restored prairie systems of Iowa. Since wasps forage on nectar, we were interested in exploring the potential ability and efficiency of paper wasps as pollinators. This is a greatly understudied phenomenon, so the purpose of this project was to gain insight into the ecological role of Polistes fuscatus. If paper wasps are pollinating some plant genera such as Solidago, they could be a crucial element of sexual reproduction of native habitats through pollen deposition. We measured pollen abundance and diversity as well as floral fidelity on wild-caught wasps and compared these measures to known pollinators, both native bees and soldier beetles, to determine if wasps have the potential to pollinate. Pollen was washed from each specimen and mounted on a microscope slide to be counted and identified. We predicted that wasps will have a similar amount of body pollen grains to native bee species, but they may show lower floral abundance of most pollen species. However, with some plant species such as Solidago which wasps visit frequently, there may be a high abundance of pollen grains similar to those carried by native bees such that wasps could be considered a possible pollinator of the genus.
