Diving In

Our blogs & photo essays about Scuba Diving, travel, nature and this amazing planet above & below the sea….

Amazing Blue Mud Wasps, Carnivorous Plants & Sci-Fiction

I was looking for butterflies. Honestly. Anyway, I found wasps. Hundreds of wasps & bees in all shapes, sizes and colors.  Truly a type of pollinator heaven of a garden.  But this garden has many surprises including a poison garden - and a native Carolina bog garden.

Enter the weird bug-eating plants...

NC native Pitcher plants lure bugs in with smell, but then slip down & can't get out.  They're drowned & digested by the plant. (These inspired “Sidney” in Little Shop of Horrors)

Wicked looking Blue Mud Wasps flew among the plants. Good for a nice macro challenge.  Snap! Snap!  Fortunately, they are not particularly aggressive.  Not that I knew this at the time. (BTW I am allergic to bee stings.) But I digress.

This is where it gets weird…

I’ve seen wasps hunting on my anise plants before.  In late summer they are hunting (er, pollinating) a lot to feed their larvae. For the Blue Mud Wasp - this is usually a (stolen) nest from another type of mud dauber or carpenter bee - that’s then packed with yummy things for the larvae to eat like…black widow spiders.  Yep - it’s their favorite snack.

Some of the wasps were poking their heads into the plants. Presumably to steal bugs?  Seemed risky!

But instead of stealing bugs...they were licking the scilla (hairs) on the plants.  Whaaaa??

Two days before, I noticed a wasp drinking nectar. Looked it up.  Turns out (Google is your friend), wasps do sip nectar - quick energy during nesting season.  So is this what the wasps are doing?

But - How do they avoid falling prey to the slick sides of pitcher plant?

Answer: They have developed a hilariously funny method of stealing food from a pitcher plant.

They cross their little back legs over the ledge and go butt-end up.

By now I’m watching with some fascination (and laughing)  - when I saw something bizarre

You are now in the Twilight Zone.

Then I observed something very surprising....

A female wasp - with a tool.

No lie. The wasp carried a pine needle some distance and managed to lever it into a pitcher plant.  She walked down inside - wiggled it around a bunch - and used it to back out like Aladdin with a magic rope. She took her needle with her.  She came back - three times.  She even dive-bombed me looking into “her” plant. She ended up hiding in the plant, peeking up to see if I was still there.  Eventually, a very puzzled Keeley had to leave.

I came back later. And found what she was working on.

(Cue music from the Twilight Zone….)

Think about it.  I mean, we know bees communicate in the hive. Aka - "hive mentality".  What if...wasps are smart too?  Can they communicate with each other even though they don’t live in hives?  Like say, crows that can recognize "mean" humans and somehow...other crows recognize  (and mob) the same human hundreds of miles away.  (this is also a scientifically proven fact)

Lends a whole new level of meaning to those  Killer Hornet news stories now doesn't it??

What if - they are smarter than we think. They’re hunting in packs.  Naw….

That’s just plain crazy!

While this all seems unusual behavior (and I took a LOT of photos) - the needle turned out to be benign, I think.  I believe she was packing a nest. Unfortunately that location at the bottom of the Pitcher plant won’t go so well for her little offspring.

But still. I might need some wasp spray. Just
in case I find hornets trying to pick the lock on my house next week.

And for that nest of ground hornets that chased my husband in after mowing the lawn.

The End.  Bzzzz. Bzzzz.