Occasionally one may peer into the grass and see something that makes one wonder why evolution has gone down a particular route. A recent walk across the Firehills found a brightly coloured wasp sporting some interesting accoutrements. Hanging below its face were a pair of globular things that seemed to defy logic. They are the swollen tips of the maxillary palps, but their size would suggest that they must have some purpose. Speculation is rarely wise, but in this case one might speculate that the globular things could perhaps be involved in the detection of pheromones. The wasp is a male Halticoptera hippeus of the family Pteromalidae, it is one of the Chalcid wasps that are parasitoids of insect eggs.