Insects by Picture
Bees, Ants, and Wasps by Picture
Hymenoptera Taxonomy
Black and Yellow Mud Dauber - Wikipedia
Black and Yellow Mud Dauber - AbundantNature.com
Black and Yellow Mud Dauber - Univeristy of Florida
Black and yellow mud daubers are solitary parasitoid wasps. Females collect mud balls in wet areas and take them to an elevated area they consider safe to build a nest, often human houses and other buildings. The nests can have as many as 25 cells, into which the female lays eggs and places up to several small spiders she has stung in each cell as food for the larvae. After coverfing the whole structure with mud, the nest can be as large as a baseball. After finishing a series of cells, the mother abandons the nest. The larvae make cocoons in their cells, then pupate. Finally, they hatch and eat the spiders. Adults appear in mid-summer and drink nectar from flowers. They are generally peaceful and only sting to protect their nests. A common species of cuckoo wasp, Chrysis angolensis, is frequently a cleptoparasite in Sceliphron nests, and is only one of many different insects that parasitize these mud daubers.
In the early afternoon of April 17, 2017, a mud dauber flew into my kitchen through the open door, and immediately started trying to get out. This happens a lot with wasps, it seems. It bounced against the kitchen window above the sink a few times and tried the door to the breezway, which has "french" windows in it, and which I closed once the wasp came inside. It seemed frantic to get out of the house.
Once I got the imagery I wanted, I opened the window wide and, after a few near misses, the wasp flew back out to the yard.
I took this picture of a nest I took on January 3, 2017. The nest was on the wall by my back patio.
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| Click the photo to enlarge it |
