“Honey, we need to spray a new hornet’s nest on the porch. I kept seeing this hornet flying around the porch, and I found a nest right near the door that I saw it building.”
Sure enough, a hive-like jobby about three inches across, in posession of a number of tube-like entryways, but without any honeycomb pattern visible, was under construction in a rafter. It had not been there but a few days earlier.
Looked like it could be wasp-paper or the like, and I had seen one of those huge brown wasp-like things around recently, so I take the Raid variety build for the purpose, and let the nest have it big-time, in the early evening.
About 36 hours later, I start removing the nest. Turns out it’s made of some clay-like substance, and the dead things that fall out are not hornets or anything bee-like, but about a dozen greenish-brownish house spiders of the most common variety around here.
What were they doing there? Was it really a spider colony, a la a really bad William Shatner movie, or were they in there already dead as baby hornet food, or do they symbiotically live there or what?
Wasps sting spiders which leaves them alive but parylyzes them for the rest of their now short lives. Then they lay the eggs in the body and when they hatch the wasp larvae have live spider for breakfast.
What, not everyone in the world is familiar with mud daubers? I’m kind of amazed, sort of like someone posting that there were these little crawly insects who invaded their picnic, but didn’t know what they were.
Y’know, you can catch one pretty easily. My dad told me that he used to catch them and tie a thread around its middle, then let it fly around on a leash. I used to catch them all the time. Then, after carrying one around for 20 or 30 minutes in my hand, he stung me. It was about like a bee sting, not as bad as a normal wasp sting, but until that point I had no idea they were capable. The only bad thing is that they build their nests in inconvenient locations. They especially like the nooks and crannies of my boat. It messed up some of the wires behind the dash when I tried to pull the nest off of the bundle.