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The Daily Bucket - In a Community of Wasps [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-04
It might be near 10am on the west coast by the time I get morning coffee.
But I’ll be here shortly….
A few summers ago (August 2012), I pulled my nap chair out to the front porch. When I sat down, leaned back & looked up, I saw An Interesting Thing: a small paper wasp community facing the same direction. Not working, unusually still. I said “Hey! guys! Don’t move! I gotta get my camera”. And they didn’t move & I did & it looked like this:
enlarge
As if they stopped in the middle of the work shift to meditate
They’ve stopped working, including the one with its head deep in a top cell. None moved.
Then they did: they all went back to work. I took a few more pictures & went back to my napping plan.
I went out and pretended to nap for a couple more days, to see if there’d be any repeat performances,
but there weren’t .
Later, when I was going through the week of pictures, I saw this: a water carrier wasp:
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Water Carrier.
The Boss is back, everybody go back to work.
I came up with a story that sounded good to me…because...they’re paper wasps making paper.
They need water to make paper. They’re waiting for water from the designated water carrier.
When the water carrier got back to the nest, she visited with each of the other wasps,
passed them a bit of water & then they all went back to work:
Head to head, mouth to mouth
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Head to head, passing water.
Look here —
in the first picture when they’re all frozen,
there are 6 wasps.
In the next picture, there are 7.
Other pictures show 7.
Here, it looks like their heads are touching,
passing water, then they go back to work.
That’s what I see.
…………………….
Seven wasps a-working...
Meanwhile,
I’m headed to a hypothesis as I wander around the yard checking my hose-drip irrigation system.
There are wet puddly places with dribbly hoses dribbling on the plants I want alive.
In those wet spots, little bugs & flying things - flies, crawling things, wasps & hornets - would fly up while i passed, then settle back down. Wasps! flying knee high & headed up towards my baggy shorts.
I was slightly concerned every time that happened.
By the 3rd or 4th time with no signs of aggressive stinging bugs up my shorts,
I unilaterally decided that water spots were areas of truce. I’d already decided that they wanted water, so I set up a chair & a bucket full of water & sat there for three weeks of August & July every day —until I started to sweat. When the water started rolling off me, I quit for the day.
I got a lot of photos, saw a lot of fights, saw a lot of cooperation. Amazing stuff.
Sitting in a cloud of wasps, hornets & other things I tend to avoid, I never got stung
This is the set up:
The Photo Studio:
If I filled it, they would come
This is the result: wasps filling themselves with water.
Watching up close, I could see their segments pumping back and forth
and expanding as they broke the surface tension & filled up with water.
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Moving water from place to place inside a wasp
From a Bucket filled to surface tension
Nice wings, no rips no ragged edges.
Wasps with signs of age were attacked, bumped, chased away.
Not always.
Some wasps were bullies & chased off everything before they settled in for water.
Mostly, they were compatible with each other. Not always.
Some were tolerant of their own kind, some chased off all others.
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they use that surface tension
Some of them wore Batman Logos.
Some were things that made the wasps & hornets
so shy that they’d all leave the rim of the bucket.
This Scary Thing went methodically to every wasp on the rim of the bucket & looked at them.
Nothing could stand to be in its presence. It didn’t attack, it just gave ‘em the evil eye.
enlarge the Scary Thing
It seems to have mouth parts from a fly.
Old with ragged wings.
Still walks on water.
Some of them fly with their legs hanging
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After a while,
I was frustrated with the photos I was taking, I saw possibilities I couldn’t quite get.
That’s when I just started waving the camera around & snapping at random, hoping for the best.
Never quite got the best, but I recommend the process.
If I don’t like a photo, maybe it’ll have angles & shapes that can be emphasized.
Make it something else: Push Button Art. Out of focus? Tweak it.
For all this I used a Panasonic GH-1 camera with a Leica DG Macro-ELMARIT 45/F2.8 lens.
That’s all for now.
In putting this together, I learned a little about wasps.
I was wrong about my interpretations of relations between Wasps & Hornets!
Here’s the Local Truth
from Bird Watching HQ:
Wasps, Hornets, and Yellowjackets in California
The Wikipedia article on True Hornets
The Wikipedia on Bald-Faced Hornets (are wasps!)
Bald-faced Hornets
from the Bohart Museum of Entomology at University of California, Davis
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I’ve a lot more Wasp photos & tweaks, a few bugs & some things the cat’s dragged in.
What’s under your plywood covered in leaves?
What flies out from under your eaves?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
[END]
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