What the heck is this?
Sep 8, 2020 21:37:58 #
That's one egg per pot. Possibly a dozen pots all told, or less. This is a common pattern for solitary wasps, whether individual 'pots' or stacks or lines of mud cells, each with one egg per cell and one or more food items. Also tunnel and tube nests with sequential cells separated by leaf plugs, wax plugs, chewed wood plugs, etc..
Sep 9, 2020 11:07:12 #
fetzler
Loc: North West PA
quixdraw wrote:
Potter Wasp nest, I think. They are apparently nasty stingers. Search and you'll find lots of info.
Gee, I though it was a jug for a Leprechaun. HI HI
Sep 9, 2020 13:41:49 #
relbugman wrote:
That's one egg per pot. Possibly a dozen pots all told, or less. This is a common pattern for solitary wasps, whether individual 'pots' or stacks or lines of mud cells, each with one egg per cell and one or more food items. Also tunnel and tube nests with sequential cells separated by leaf plugs, wax plugs, chewed wood plugs, etc..
Thanks for the info relbugman. As of today (Wednesday), the pot is still open and there is only the one. I'm starting to think it has been abandoned.
JackM
Sep 9, 2020 14:42:55 #
After several days you can probably assume it is abandoned. When you decide, you might open it up and see if the offspring had actually emerged, leaving some spider (or other prey) legs, and/or the left shed pupal skin and meconium -- many wasps store their last defication in the left-over skin as a dark splot.
Sep 9, 2020 14:55:58 #
relbugman wrote:
After several days you can probably assume it is abandoned. When you decide, you might open it up and see if the offspring had actually emerged, leaving some spider (or other prey) legs, and/or the left shed pupal skin and meconium -- many wasps store their last defication in the left-over skin as a dark splot.
I'll do that. Thanks relbugman.
JackM
Sep 23, 2020 18:53:27 #
jackm1943 wrote:
I found this on my back door late yesterday aftern... (show quote)
After all this time (about 3 weeks), the pot is suddenly closed. Apparently mama wasp came back and closed it up, maybe after inserting an egg and/or some poor larva. I'm going to keep an eye on it and see if or when it opens back up.
Sep 24, 2020 09:03:49 #
Wow, three weeks to fill. It will be interesting to see if another species happened to use the open pot. Thinking about the earlier post, I am asking myself if, when the Potter Wasp emerges in a normal sequence, it does not open a new exit hole on the side of the pot rather than using the entry plugged by its mother. Seems to me that this is the norm, in which case the pot was probably never closed (or filled) by the parent. Many things could happen to the parent during its hunting forays. Simple observations like this are very informative.
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