We’ve been watching a fine-backed red paper wasp building her nest in one of our bird boxes. Her name is Janet (one of our livestream watchers, B. A., named her for Janet van Dyne, a Marvel comics character who could transform herself from society lady to crime-fighting super hero at the drop of a “Help me, someone please help me!”).
Janet has been hard at work creating her papier-mâché nest for 3 or 4 weeks now and she doesn’t seem to be slowing down. She harvests wood fibers from trees outside the box, chews them into a sticky paste with saliva, and then carefully spits the paste out in thin layers to create open cells for her eggs. We’ve seen her lay 9 eggs as I write this (on August 6th, 2024) but she no doubt has more, and 2 eggs have hatched, miraculously producing fully-grown wasps. So we’re now watching 3 wasps in the nest.
As Dan says in the narration for this little video, Janet has extraordinarily maneuverable “arms”. They seem to be attached to her thorax with ball joints. She can reach over her head, behind her back, directly in front of her, and pretty much everywhere else. We find this fascinating, and we thought you might, too.
2 Comments
A few years ago, I observed a red paper wasp taking a shower on our fountain! There’s about three videos here. https://youtube.com/shorts/GPQxRF7Dvd4?si=JbnDsW_2_HiSrab4
The video is really interesting. Thank you. We often see red paper wasps around our water bowls here. We have a big dark-blue ceramic dish on the deck that we use for water for the squirrels and other small creatures, and when it’s hot and dry the bees will line up around the rim to drink like wildebeest at a watering hole in the Senengeti.