Could be looking for leaf miners to parasitize, especially if you see tapping with the antenna. You have a pretty good camera or your critters are very well-behaved. :)

Do all of these come out of their cocoon adult size and coloring? I thought so. Reason for asking is that I saw a different group today. They were a bit bigger and different colors. The dark ones were about The Logicians mentioned size of 10mm, the reddish ones a bit smaller. They were not behaving as hectic, so I got some pictures for comparison. My camera is good, I am the one messing up if the critters don’t behave...

Hard for me to tell. It looks like the resting wing positions are different, but maybe they aren't all resting. :P

But really, there are so many species that are similar in appearance. You kinda have to stick them on a pin and put them under magnification to look at wing vein patterns and other features. Entomologists have to kill the things they love.

Sometimes when an insect comes out of the cocoon or molts or whatever, they can change color a little over time their exoskeleton hardens, but there shouldn't be much change. The markings sholdn't change. I can't tell if these have the same markings.

Thank you! I would like to know, but not enough to kill any of them. Funny thing though. My daughter had to do an insect collection for her Entomology class last year. She didn’t really want to kill anything either, so we found a lot of recently dead insects that were not dried out yet. There was a cadisfly on the grill of my husband’s car that was still in good shape. Nobody could identify it, not even her professor who is “the”authority in cadisflies. It’s now in the collection at Clemson. And no, She doesn’t know the little wasps either. She is into Butterflies and moth of Peru and Paraguay.

Hard to be certain, but image 1 of 4, when rotated and enlarged, appears to have the two recurrent FW veins forming the "horsehead" cell and extra cell that is a key difference between braconids and ichneumonids. So the insects in 1, 2, and 4 would be Ichneumons. Image 3 looks like at least a different species.

https://bugguide.net/node/view/85925

http://jenny.tfrec.wsu.edu/opm/displaySpecies.php?pn=920

Bugguide has 800 pages of Ichneumons, good luck!

I have the same problem, after photographing insects I feel reluctant to kill them just to be able to put a label on the photo. But that's how the information we have on them was gathered.