This text was sent to me - with the offer of using it as a 'guest blog'. Very interesting, and it leads on to an article I wrote elsewhere!
I'm very pleased to be able to post this 'guest blog' - thanks Jennifer. I actually wrote a brief article about the Mud Dauber Wasp a while ago for a French newspaper. You can get to it from my personal blog here
(http://drofbees.blogspot.com/), and see a few other of my earlier (pre Suite101) articles about walking in France and various birds and beasties
The 'guest blog' follows:
Last weekend, when my mom and dad were visiting here from the East
Coast, my second grader Emily espied three small wasp nests on the eave
overhanging our front door. Dad said they were mud dauber wasp nests:
The wasps stick bits of mud together into a grayish muffin-sized blob.
Today, the exterminator came while Emily was in school, and he just
knocked them down with a broom handle (high tech!) onto the patio. He
took a look, and said they were abandoned; apparently, mud dauber wasps
only use the mud blobs as a place to lay their eggs, then they leave.
The eggs had already hatched, metamorphosed, and flown away, leaving
evenly spaced, cylindrical holes in the blobs. So, I put the two most
well preserved of them in a zip lock bag, and clipped the bag to the
fridge. Emily might find them interesting, was my reasoning.
Their paternal grandmother, Grandma Ilene from NYC, came a few days
ago. She asked what the grey things in the zip lock bag were. I told
her the girls had made muffins "from scratch," were saving two for her,
and expected her to eat them. :) After I finished applying the heart
defibrilator to my mother-in-law, I told her about the wasp nests.
When my daughters Emily and Jessica got home, I gave them each one, and
little Jess promptly gave hers to Em. Emily was enchanted. She poked
around, broke them open, then - oh, joy! - found a dead grub in the
center of one. After telling me about how, clearly, the grub needed the
protection of the mud because of its lack of exoskeleton and other
defenses, she disappeared. She soon came back with her microscope, a
slide, and the protective goggles that came with a long-unused fake
fossil dig game. She was very excited; "When I put the grub on the
slide, some pee came out! So I sucked it up with a pipette, and look!"
Suddenly there's a pipette in my face, with a miniscule amount of
moisture in it. Just beyond my view of the pipette, a more enchanting
view of my 7-year old, with sparkling eyes and ear-to-ear smile. What
else could I say? "That's nice pee, Emily." Pause. "Could you go squirt
it in the bathroom sink now?"
Just another day in the funhouse. Right now, Emily's on the internet.
Grandma googled "mud dauber wasps," and they're reading up on them. I'm
sure glad her grandparents all travel across the country to visit us.i
