Seeing wasps in another light, a Blog Off post
Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something known as a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same subject matter on the identical day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What is Home?"
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I moved to Florida nearly 20 years ago. and within those first couple of weeks I ran into what my dad would have called Florida's "bug problem."
My first exposure to Florida's insects took place in the wee hours of the morning. I was living in Orlando then and I thought that hermetically sealed suburban house I called home at the time could shield me from anything Florida could throw at me.
Hah. In the pre-dawn hours one morning I was lying in bed, drifting between consciousness and unconsciousnesss. I was on my back when I felt something crawl across my naked chest. In the same motion, I grabbed the bug crawling across me and leapt out of bed. With my heart still racing, I decided that the only good Florida bug was a dead one. That was my first exposure to the Palmetto bug. Palmettos are a large species of cockroach. Unlike most roaches, palmetto bugs don't set up house in a house. Rather they get in when they're looking for water or by mistake. I didn't know that then. To me, what had just crawled over me was the largest cockroach the northeast had ever produced. Ugh.
Despite Florida's tropical climate, I was going wage a one man war against the worst Florida could throw at me. So I spent the next 15 years or so killing anything that crawled, buzzed or spun a web. There was no pesticide strong enough so car as I was concerned.
I moved to St. Pete in 1996 and once I came there has been a worm I hadn't handled earlier than. This is the Gulf Coast of Florida's dust dauber wasp.
It's commonly called the black and yellow mud dauber but technically, its real name isSceliphron caementarium. S. caementarium is nearly three inches long and is a pretty intimating creature. When I first encountered one of them it was just another thing that was waiting to sting me and I couldn't kill it fast enough.
However, they simply kept coming and anyplace they ended up they would make their fist-sized nests. Every time I'd knock one down it might be complete of dead spiders. That always mystified me.
At across the equal time I was mystified through the contents of a dust dauber's nest the net changed into taking form and for the first time, I should song down information easily. In doing searches I observed out the call of my wasp and I commenced to examine about its way of existence.
S. caementarium is a solitary wasp and once I realized that it wasn't going to sting me, I could see it for the beautiful creature it is. I mean look at it. It's abdomen pretty much defines a wasp waist. What a gorgeous animal.
Female dust daubers are skilled hunters and that they hunt spiders. Once they catch one they sting it. They do not sting to kill, simply to paralyze. Once their prey's been stupefied, they shipping it again to structure like this.
I took that photo on my patio yesterday.
These structures that I used to assume were nests are actually brooding chambers. It take the wasp a couple weeks to construct and it's made from soil and saliva and she makes it one mouthful at a time. It's not until it's completed that she goes about her hunting missions.
Her aim in existence is to pass along her genes and she or he does so by means of building a shape, filling it with paralyzed spiders, and then laying a single egg on pinnacle of them. Once the egg's sealed into the chamber, it passes via its larval and pupal ranges unseen and with none assist from its parents.
Now that I recognise these things about our dust daubers I don't kill them on sight manifestly. How ought to I kill some thing with the sort of lifestyles story? Learning approximately them had a couple of results I never could have imagined. It made me rethink the complete own family of bugs and the entire kingdom Insecta.
IfS. caementarium had a story to tell what other bugs did? Well it turns out just about all of them do. Even my much-loathed Palmetto bug, orEurycotis floridana, as it's more properly known. Though I still can't prevent myself from killing every palmetto bug I see, I stop and consider the rest of them. Our humble mud dauber gave me a window into a world I would have ever seen otherwise. The creatures we consider to be pests are every bit as evolved as we are. In some ways they fit their environments better than we do.