Black and Yellow Mud Dauber
I found this wasp crawling on our window at about the same time as we found last weeks Blue Mud Dauber (mid-July of 2007[1]). This is the related Black and Yellow Mud Dauber, Sceliphron caementarium.
Like the Blue Mud Dauber, these have a very long, thin waist. I’m not sure why that is, it must give some advantage. Maybe it gives them the ability to sting a spider without getting close enough to it to risk getting bitten?
They also build nests out of mud and stock them with spiders for their young, same as the blue mud daubers do. In fact, they arguably do it better than the blue mud daubers do. The black and yellow mud daubers evidently prefer to start a fresh nest from scratch every time, while the blue mud daubers frequently take over and refurbish the nests that the black and yellows have emerged from.
The tendency of mud daubers to fill tubes with mud and spiders is not necessarily innocuous: they have a tendency to plug the pitot tubes[2] that make up a critical part of the airspeed indicators in airplanes. There is at least one serious plane crash that was probably caused by mud daubers.
Aside from color, and the few differences in their habits, the black and yellow mud daubers and the blue mud daubers are basically in the same ecological niche, and I imagine that they compete directly with each other. So, most of the things I wrote about the blue mud dauber also apply here.
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[1] Again, these wasps were big enough that the photographs were taken without the macro lens, so they don’t show as much fine detail as I might like. The surface it’s laying on is a standard playing card (the eight of hearts from a standard “Bicycle” deck) if you want a sense of scale. Anyway, the snow is finally melting, and within the next couple of weeks I should be able to start taking new pictures again instead of having to haul out all these old ones. So, hopefully the picture quality is going to improve.
[2] A pitot tube is a tube pointing in the direction that the plane is flying, so that air rams down its length and develops a pressure. The airspeed indicator works by comparing this pressure to the pressure in an outlet that does not have air being rammed down it, and calculates the airspeed from this pressure difference. Obviously, if the tube is plugged up by mud, it isn’t going to work right.
I feel your pain about posting old less-quality-than-you’d-accept-today archive photos. I’ve been doing that for months… Stupid snow.
But the photos are actually very good, and more than enough for identification purposes.
I imagine their central nervous system is much like spiders’ – a bundle of nerves mashed together near their heads. Your earlier post on the digestive system of a gnat gives me greater appreciation for these insects’ dining habits. You can look at these guys and imagine the cutaway view …
Snow?
Yes, we still have about 1 to 2 feet of snow on the ground here. It’s in the process of melting, but it probably won’t be all gone until around the end of April.
What’s in that narrow tube that connects the body to the tail end of the beast? It looks like it’s just a pipe. Does the tail end have intestines?
Oh my we have those here too sometimes, I usually run away from them, lol. Anna
As far as I know, yes, the digestive tract has to run through that narrow waist, as do the circulatory fluids (if they are like other wasps and bees, the kidney equivalent has to be in the abdomen, so hemolymph from the rest of the body has to get into the abdomen and back, somehow). The adult mud daubers evidently have a mostly liquid diet (they go after plant nectar and the like for themselves, the spiders are only for the grubs to eat), so that probably helps in moving things through that long waist.
I just caught a live Yellow and black mu dauber, i was wondering how do you kill a whole nest of them, they are making a nest in my outdoor patio light fixture, they enter by where the screws go and leave via the over hang?