wasps
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City Habitat
Now that the dog-day cicadas have started to emerge from their years underground, their enemy, the cicada wasps, emerge as well. And since our street trees have roots, which is what the cicadas live on while during their nymph stage, so too do our streets have these wasps.Yesterday, walking in Brooklyn Heights, I found a…
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Welcome wasps!
I first noticed this mud-dauber wasp nest in my backyard in January. It’s the work of a female black and yellow mud dauber, Sceliphron caementarium. The mud-pellet nest is right outside my back door, on one of the mini I-beams that support the balcony. The nest had probably been built late last summer, or even…
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The Catskills ~ Day 2
We started the morning in the thickest fog any of us had ever seen. It lifted as we descended down towards Hunter, NY.We couldn’t resist stopping in this former drive-in on Route 296 south of Windham, now claimed by a meadow. The gate proudly claims “we will be back,” but that seems unlikely. Meanwhile, this…
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BK 4BR Park Vue Fully Stocked
The Nethermead Arches is a great place for wasp condos. The bridge provides protection from the sun and rain, so organpipe mud-dauber wasps, Trypoxylon politum, build their nests upon its vertical surfaces. Each tube here is made up of several separate cells. An egg was laid in each cell with a cache of paralyzed spiders…
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Hymenoptera
We went into Prospect Park on Saturday with a group from the Bee Watchers study. John Ascher of the American Museum of Natural History, whose fingers are visible below, led the expedition — which actually didn’t go very far since there were plenty of plants in bloom near the Boat House, where we began. There…
Backyard and Beyond 