Silk. The caterpillars construct tents of the stuff for protection and to help them move around.
I seem to remember reading similar tales of horror from Australia, where the warm weather does not kill imported European wasps and they build nests to ridiculous sizes. Imagine that in your roof space…
Tje caterpillar pics remind me of the X-files episode where ancient swarming insects were released by cutting old-growth timber.
A similar-sized wasp nest was found near here (in Alabama) where the thing had grown from the ground up into the floor of a mobile home.
I get nightmares just thinking about it.
I used to think caterpillars were cute and fuzzy. I had no idea that that cute and fuzzy caterpillars, en masse, could make me want to curl up in corner and whimper.
Those caterpillars belong in a 50s movie with the word “invasion” in the title.
Those yellowjackets – a nest that large would scare the everliving bajeesus out of me.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr!!!
They have started working on the Death Star. :eek:
I read that article a couple days ago, and thought of my brother. A week before he was removing his dog house from the kennel with a cement slab. He found a large number of Yellow Jackets were entering under the slab. He dumped hornet poison and gasoline down the hole leading to the underground nest and sealed it with something large and heavy. He had a couple hundred show up on the slab that were out at the time. He felt the throbing of the suckers under the slab, when he sealed the entrance, before the strays showed up. It would be interesting to know the size that colony reached, so that you could feel the thruming through the cement under your feet. The nastiest bees, hornets, or wasps around here are the Yellow Jackets.
Every once in a while the papers have pictures of a large honey bee nest, built in a houses wall. They been there for years and are huge. The residents say something about they could here something in the wall for years, but had no idea bees were in the wall. You have to be very unobservent to miss it all those years.
IANAE but certain species of yellowjackets do indeed also build nests above ground… often they look just like an orb-shaped hornet’s nest.
Regardless, 5 gallons of diesel and a match would my answer for that little problem.
Cobwebs, basically. When I was a kid, we had a tent-caterpillar infestation in our apple tree out behind the house, but thank Og not anything like that. The ‘tents’ were a cobwebby fibrous substance made of thin strands all joined together. I’m not sure whether the insects secrete it en masse to pupate in, or what.
Wikipedia says that it’s silk .
I stand corrected! From the Extension literature of the venerable institution with which I am affiliated:
Nests are built in trees, shrubs or in protected places such as inside human-made structures (attics, hollow walls or flooring, in sheds, under porches and eaves of houses), or in soil cavities, mouse burrows, etc. Nests are made from wood fiber chewed into a paper-like pulp.
Fun yellowjacket fact: Once you disturb the nest, they are hyperaggressive, and the first 'jacket to sting you leaves a little smear of pheromone on you that says to every other 'jacket in the vicinity, “Enemy! Sting this until it dies!” At that point, it’s entirely possible to be swarmed by hundreds or thousands of them (although tens is far more common,) and they don’t stop stinging.
Two years ago, while doing field work in north Alabama, I disturbed a nest, and within seconds, I was mobbed by the little demons. One got under my T-shirt and stung me 8-10 times in the ribs. One got my elbow. One stung my left eyelid. I got stings all over my hands, ankles, and legs. It was brutal. I’m not allergic, thank god, but I didn’t sleep for two days because of the pain. I literally could not straighten my body completely because of the stings on my ribcage. It felt like somebody hit me with a baseball bat.
And the kicker? Because of the little pheromone marker, I could not outrun them. I felt the first sting, and took off. I ran for 50-100 yards, and was immediately attacked again when I slowed down. I ran again, toward the truck, and was stung again as I approached it.
Hideous little bastards, yellowjackets are.
Oh, and freckafree, yellowjackets (Vespula spp., Dolichovespula spp.) all build paper nests, but Vespula build them under ground.
Maybe someone should mention him in this thread.
The tree of choice in this area is the mullberry tree. Every last one of them was leafless this year. They stay behind the silk during the day, to avoid being eaten by birds. They crawl all over the tree at night eating. The ones on saw on mullberry trees this year look like snakes writhing on the trunks. The masses were up to three foot long going around the trunks and undulating. It was very creepy to see. I try to open the nexts when young and take a one cup spray bottle of Bacillus thuringiensis on my walks.
I was going to, but I didn’t want to honk my own lonk, so to speak. 
What would a hornless Lonk honk? His honkerchief?
points and laughs
Man, that would have never happened to me. BWAHAHA!
Penis.
Thankfully,** Inigo**, I wasn’t the only one who noticed that about the lonk picture; or, at least, for a change, I wasn’t the first to point it out.
And those bugs were nuts.
I had a somewhat similar experience to your Ogre, although yours sounds more severe.
I noticed lots of wasps going in and out of a hole underneath a wooden play house I had built for the kids; I sprayed a whole load of ‘foaming wasp nest destroyer’ in the hole and ran away. A couple of days later I went back and there was a big heap of dead wasps and no activity, so I thought I’d remove the nest and fill up the void so that no new one would develop.
I tipped the play house on its side and the nest was there underneath, nestled into a depression in the ground - it was only about the size of a (soccer)football, and there was still no activity. I had a plastic sack open ready and I tried to pick up the nest with a garden fork, but it broke open and a large number of wasps swarmed all over me, stinging me many times - all the way up my legs. Oh, I was wearing loose shorts and a t shirt. I was quite ill from the venom.
I did actually wonder if the pheremone attack marker might be persistent or even systemic to the person who has been stung, because, despite changing my clothes and showering twice daily, I still had wasps acting immediately aggressively toward me for days, even weeks after the main attack.
SWEET MOTHER OF JESUS!!! :eek: :eek: That looks right out of the “Alien” movies!
Weird thing is, I have no fear of yellowjackets. While growing up, my mother’s best friend always told me how they were actually docile insects, not prone to aggression, and we’d often share our picnics with them and sometimes even let them crawl all over us. Never got stung once. Now I wonder if I got super-lucky, or somehow learned to cohabitate peacefully with these creatures…
(And, umm, what’s the deal about the sheep with the giant wooly oysters? Most surreal hijack ever, that was…)