Modern Vespa

Early morning or late evening they are pretty docile (before or after a hard day of being bastards) and you can drop the nest into a fine mesh net or sack* and dispose at your leisure. Whether you choose to liberate is up to you.


*Close it real quick

Very interesting! I once worked for a professor that kept black widow spiders as pets. He always named them the same thing. He fed them crickets. Fascinating to watch one go in for the kill. Like most predators, they are very careful not to get injured themselves.

You have a great interest in entomology?

So you now have the 3 wasps, presumably they arent all from the same nest/colony/clan. Do they just get along, or will there end up being fights.

Our little winter guests seem to be doing well, there's five of them now in the Vespa Hotel, and when the sun shines on their digs and warms them up they get very active and run around their compound like crazy.

I provide them with a basic menu of water and honey, supplemented by various items that they might like, such as a slice of apple, maybe several drops of applesauce and yogurt.

They are experts at hiding in sheltered places at night, and are difficult to see in there until they pop out in the daytime again.

Five good job Bill Dog has been ejected from this topic, he'd have something to say .
Turning into a Winter Wasp Hostel, did you go out and catch them JB or was they attracted to the 5 star accommodation.

It's not a boutique hotel unless you have the right artwork.

I put them with Spiders Eawigs and centipedes the only good one is a dead one you can add rats also. If i did not live in a northern part of the country i am sure my list would be longer. The squirrels are just fun to hit with the bb gun I like to watch them jump. I just go out on my back porch and shake the gun and they scramble.

Naughty, Naughty, hope adri doesn't see this, if he does I hope he's got a sense of humor

I would NEVER! As a telecom field engineer I fight these little a-holes every summer season cause they like to build nests inside our distribution outdoor cabinets and boxes. I've been stung too many times to care for them. BUT at least I get to kill them using a Vespa...

Rather you than me, working at height and wasps 😉👍

"You know what you are? You're an anti-waspite, Jerry, AN ANTI-WASPITE!!!"

I know! Let's make a wasp (Vespa) from nuts and bolts....

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1356847395226503?mibextid=IX6t0L

You know, it's threads like this that make me fear retirement.

Okay, full disclosure, while I generally lean toward tolerance and coexistence, the yellowjacket nest in the crack in our concrete patio right under the swing was just too much, and I wasn't going to abandon half the patio for them. I'd read about someone running a shop vac with the hose to the entrance hole for 12 hours, so I went to work with a 4 foot pvc pipe and a portable vacuum over a few days. I think my body count was 600+

I'm actually a bit fond of their bigger cousins, but they make better neighbors....less annoying and aggressive.

Fledermaus,

This has been one wild thread. You got to love JBlackund, I swear he is posting from outer space from the Planet Weebo. But, it is good to have a little alien contact.

Bob Copeland

Love it

Backland You cant call me names that is against the rules.

Where?
Posting Guidelines

This topic needs a theme tune.

How one single Insect has caught the Imagination of hundreds of users on this forum, Great 🤪.
Is there any film producers on here, how about JBacklund in the
MYSTERIOUS WASP WHISPERER OF SOUTH DAKOTA
or is this going to far.🤣

At least I'm not...ummm...'hosting' a bunch of wood ticks over the winter, fascinating as THAT might be.

I would never do that.

It was Kramer specifically accusing Jerry of being an anti-waspite.

HOWEVER!!

Saying "Tick-A-Torium' certainly does, as they say, roll off the tongue in a very satisfying way, doesn't it?

But I reckon that feeding the little vampires might be a bit unpleasant.

No, I'll stick with my paper wasps for now.

Never heard of a Paper wasp so did a bit of RS and....

Paper wasps are vespid wasps that gather fibers from dead wood and plant stems, which they mix with saliva, and use to construct nests made of gray or brown papery material. Some types of paper wasps are also sometimes called umbrella wasps, due to the distinctive design of their nests.

AND there are 30.000 species worldwide of which 9.000 are over here in the UK .

I thought a Wasp was a Wasp and had lots of evil brothers and sisters that when you piss them off they gang up on you

AND Paper wasps, hornets, and yellowjackets all belong to the same family—the Vespidae—and they all provide extraordinarily important ecological services. Specifically, they help us through pollination, predation, and parasitism. Put simply, without wasps, we would be overrun with insect and pests. Don't kill them they all do good.

The Sting-Cooties also provide entertainment for 'the kids'...

My goodness! Is it THAT time of year again already?

Today's menu in the Wasp-a-torium's 'Wasp-a-teria' will be fresh water, fresh honey, fresh applesauce, and as an experimental item to see if they might like some animal matter to compensate for tbe carb-overload that I've been offering them, a bit of shredded leftover turkey.

All served 'Buffet Style', of course, and as much as their little machine-like mandibles can masticate.

As a side note, I think I may have found my next bike...

Definitely interested to hear if they go for the turkey.

That must be a bear in crosswinds. On the plus side, I bet cagers give it a wiiide berth!

A season at JBacklund's Wasp-a-torium

I only look at them several times during the day when they're active, and have only seen them nibbling at their honey bowl.

I haven't observed them eating the applesauce or turkey that I also gave to them, though they might be.

This one was well into the honey today...

Wow, that guy looks like he's at least a foot long!

Nice photo!

No, maybe an inch in actual body length, but the close-up lens on my phone camera takes some pretty decent close-up shots of these guys.

As a size reference, the white double feeding 'bowls' are from one of Trixie's contact lens cases.

It was kind of fascinating to learn that wasps can likely recognize faces. It wasn't all that surprising to me, as from my painting days working near nests, I could ease my way surprisingly close to them without being stung. Actually got flown into fairly often, but not stung.

I doubt I'd have the same luck with Bald-faced hornets, but I don't wanna try.

https://www.trulynolen.ca/can-wasps-recognize-human-faces/#:~:text=Before%20you%20become%20aggressive%20towards,process%20faces%20all%20at%20once.

I'm curious: how do you open the enclosure to add food without having them fly out?

I don't generally open the door when they're super active, as when they're all warmed up (or "juiced up" as my wife describes them at those times) from the sun's warmth on the enclosure, but even if one buzzes out of the 'Hotel', I can easily catch it in a cup and just put it back in.

Other than when they're hyped up and running and flying all around in there, they're quite oblivious to my presence when taking out the little food and water 'bowls', and when they're in an inactive state, they won't respond to me at all unless I get within an inch or two of one, and then it would probably just raise up on It's legs and wave it's antennae around in response.

They're truly in their own little world, and I have to go out of my way to get one to show any serious aggression (and they never have, by the way) which is not what it really would be with this type of wasp anyway, but more of a defensive reaction. Regardless, a sting is a sting, so there's that.

But, I've never been stung by one of these guys, other than a couple times while riding motorcycles, but in those cases, I never see what species got me, or type of Wasp or Bee.

Extract from wasp diary:

Day 11 in this hellhole prison, the captor we refer to as Window Eyes is now leaving rotting flesh where he also leaves what he thinks is food. Thank goodness for the honey, it might taste like dogs piss but at least it keeps us alive.

Our day will come soon my friends, Window Eyes is cunning and only opens the cage when we are sleeping but he is bound to make a mistake.

I tend to think of it as 'Bee Poop', though it's probably more accurately defined as 'Bee Spuke'..

But, yes, I sometimes wonder if they might think that they're trapped in some sort of bizarre Twilight Zone alternative universe, where instead of fulfilling their natural proclivity to die of starvation and cold, not to mention their expired usefulness to their colony, as their natural life-cycle is mysteriously stymied by the unnatural, and quite possibly unwanted 'comforts' provided by a giant, blurry, googley-eyed alien.

I'm reminded of the old Twilight Zone episode where a small group of 'people' are trapped in some kind of huge circular drum, but it has an open-top rim that is seemingly unreachable to them. They are also being driven halfway mad by a recurring and deafening 'BONG, BONG' sound coming from outside their drum prison

At some point, they finally realize that they might be able to form a human ladder by standing on each other's shoulders, and by doing so, one of them might be able to finally peer over the drum's rim at the top and see where they are.

It doesn't end well though, because when one of them finally gets a glimpse of the strange world outside of their drum prison, they realize that they're all just dolls that have been donated and thrown into a drum-like container for a Christmas charity toy collecting effort

The loud 'BONG, BONG' sound that they've been hearing turns out to just be the 'giant' bell-ringing volunteer person that was attending the toy collection drum. Something akin to the Salvation Army volunteer that you see at the exits of large retail stores collecting money during the holidays.

Do I think that 'my' wasps are experiencing something like that?....NAH!, they're just wasps, and they don't give a crap where they are.

One of the girls, little 'Vespa', preening herself in the warmth of this morning's sunshine.
https://youtube.com/shorts/l7Rd0wvfvD0?si=p8PwzBBoaNXF_4C6

Lunch being served at the Cootie Arms Hotel's Honey Bowl Restaurante...
https://youtube.com/shorts/5oQdjqwWFDA?si=64P4xgGidOM5TYYl