And now for another round of that popular game, Identify This Weird Thing I Found!
My mother found it, actually, in our yard. It’s round, papery, and about an inch long. Right inside there’s another (hollow) paper-ball. There’s a bit with a stem that broke off and fell inside- it looks like the paper-egg was hanging from something by it. The “stem” is really weird- the underside has little cell chambers like a wasp nest (but we have paper wasps and their nests don’t look anything like this). There’s dark blobs at the bottom of four of the chambers, and some of the chambers at the edges have little white things that look like they could be eggs.
I have no idea even where to start Googling. This sound like anything you’ve heard of?
That’s clearly a type of wasp’s nest I’ve seen. It looks like the start, or top of one of those paper wasps nests that grows into huge ball you have to burn. But I’ve seen smaller versions similar to that stuck to eaves on my house.
That’s a yellowjacket/wasp nest, I’d say - they start small like that, then when the first brood of workers emerges, they are built bigger in layers (which explains the shell-within-shell appearance), eventually becoming irregularly spheroid and filled with tiered layers of papery combs.
If there’s room for a free hanging nest, it’ll end up looking pretty much like the cartoon wasps nest. An outer rounded shape hiding the “honeycomb” cells for rearing the young. Exactly how the outer casing is changed/rebuilt as the nest grows I’m not sure.
When building in an enclosed space the nest will grow up against the walls and the outer casing will be unnecessary.
Just to confirm it, here’s a blog with a yellowjacket nest and a little related reading. Hornets, yellowjackets and various wasps are all part of the wasp family and a lot of their nests look the same so it’s hard to say which yours came from, but you definitely have a flying stingy waspy thing’s nest.
Those larvae make good bait for perch! We used to spray the wasps with a soap solution, take the nests, and just hook the larvae out of them. Most convenient bait you ever used.
