Ant or Wasp?

     The latest new visitors in my back yard were (and I say "were" because all three of them are quite dead now) red, fuzzy insects, about 1/2 long, that were crawling through the grass at a pretty good clip.  I had never seen anything like them.  They sort of looked like huge ants, but I had never seen a bright red, fuzzy ant.  They could have been wasps, but they didn't have wings.  The first order of business was to annihilate them.  The next was to identify them.

     

     Say hello to Dasymutills occidentalis.  These bugs are commonly called red velvet ants or cow killer ants.  But they aren't ants.  They are a species of wasp.  The females are wingless and they pack an extremely painful sting.  The males have wings, but they don't have stingers.  Both females and males make a squeaking noise which they use to warn predators.  The three wasps that I repeated stomped didn't make a sound.

     Here's a bit more information from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasymutilla_occidentalis