Scary insect - anyone know what it might be?!

[A]

Hello, wondering if anyone has seen the insect I am about to describe? I never saw anything like it before and am really interested in finding out what it was. It looked like this:

It looked exactly like a wasp but giant and red. The body was in two segments, like a wasps body. The bulbous segment of the body which is normally stripey and where the sting comes from was bright solid yellow, ridged but not stripey coloured, and was cone shaped and enormous, slightly bigger than the front section of the body but not long. It was not dragonfly shaped, the yellow cone segment was the same length as the segment of the body with the legs and wings attached and was fat rather than elongated. The whole insect was about three inches long. I think, but cannot be sure, it had double-wings, which were transparent red. From what I could see it had no black colouring at all, it was pure light red all over apart from the bright yellow stinging segment (sorry, don't know the technical terms for all this yet).

Does anyone know what it could have been? It had joined the other wasps and bees in my garden on a plant they all seem to like. It took a vague interest in the flowers on the plant for 30 seconds and then roared off (it's buzzing was really loud as you can imagine). I was so shocked by the size of it, it was amazing!

Thanks in advance.

[aeshna5]

Possibly an ichneumon wasp, such as an Ophion species?

[Pudding4brains]

Originally Posted by A

The whole insect was about three inches long.

If that's (anywhere near) accurate, I'm pretty sure it means something exotic.

If much smaller (more like 2"): Did you consider Libellula depressa or other wide-bodied dragons?

Or maybe Urocerus gigas, but that one has plenty of black ... (but okay, reddish wings). There are some other quite tall Hymenoptera (like aeshna suggested), but to my knowledge (which admittedly isn't much) these are all rather "long bodied", not phat.

Even smaller still there are some clear winged moths that mimic Hymenoptera quite well (in the genus Sesia), but these are striped.

Or something like Ctenophora ornata which has only two wings and also plenty black on it.

Considerably smaller still is the Hornet - and also striped.

[A]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. Checked out what you guys suggested. Got on to looking at paper wasps and then hornets. The closest thing I can find to it is a hornet called Vespa Orientallis (Oriental Hornet). Possibly it was a queen european wasp as those are reddish-brown? Who knows. Have my camera on standby for if it ever comes back!

Cheers.

[m1.carson]

Hi,

I think you'll find aeshna5 right on this, I half recognise the name from a few posts last year, uuuge red and a big stinger, the posts say they were very hard to kill and kept chasing you, the stinger is an ovipositor and it's trying to lay eggs in you, thinks you're a tree.

I'm sure someone will put me right on this.

Max.