Monday 5 July 2010

Digger Wasps.


These unpleasant insects seem to be everywhere this year, and it's been a full-time-job keeping up with them. Mostly they make their earthen nests in walls or behind pictures, but occasionally they build them (as they did last year) amongst Lady Magnon's clothes. She was not happy.

Normally we have just one or two that come into the house, and one can hear their high pitched buzzing quite easily. But this year they are of plague proportions.

They often build several of these inch-long earth 'nests' side-by-side, which they fill with several paralysed spiders before the eggs are laid. The newly hatched digger wasps then have their own food supply, locked into their new home, which nourishes them prior to digging themselves out.

I thoroughly approve of anything that consumes spiders, but it's the wretched earthen nests all over the place that I really don't like. Any solution to our problem would be gratefully accepted.

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9 comments:

  1. Oh, my gosh, they come into your house! So ugly! Have you called the friendly neighborhood exterminator? Wish I could help. .....maybe I don't want to come visit you.....

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  2. I believe they STING too. Unfortunately the friendly neighbourhood exterminator is ME.

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  3. I can understand you not wanting them in the house, Cro, but I think they are pretty creatures - individually...

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  4. Cro, I know what these visitors are like we have very similar over here and they are a summer pest for us, they make their nests in one of my rural sheds that I deliver mail to and inside the shed are 20 mailboxes and they always build the nests near to opening of the boxes, a farmer meets me there sometimes(she) brave one! takes off her boot and smashes the nest and chases them out, but they are trickey a week later they are back with their little clay home,naughty insect spray gets rid of them immediatley lol but is that in your list of doing? all said and done you just have to be amazed at the work of art that they are, how incredible,the end of the body looks like the thing you bang the bell with at the fair( well thats my uneducated thought anyway.

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  5. Sounds like a double hemisphere problem. I think I'll just do what your farmer friend does, and simply get rid of the nests. Yet another thing to think about every day!

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  6. Never seen anything like those wasps over here Cro. The seasons have been a bit weird and I haven't actually noticed any of the other kinds of wasps about here yet either. Come to think of it - not a cabbage white butterfly in sight this year. Makes you wonder a bit, what's going on?

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  7. Was it you who 'shoooed' them all over here? I have to keep a Badmington racquet up at Haddock's to swat the little blighters!

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  8. When we had the large vegie garden I bought a child's butterfly net and it was great for catching the cabbage white butterflies.

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  9. I've just bought a couple for HJ and Ollie, so when they've gone....

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