Oh No!

I couldn’t resist using this mud dauber’s nest in a blog. While loading wood in the shed, it stared down in surprise at us. We promised not to hit it with a piece of firewood, and even stacked the wood in a way that it couldn’t fall against it. The nest’s purpose has been served, and there is a story to be told. When the wasp makes the little tubes for its babies to grow in, fills them with paralyzed spiders for food, lays an egg in each and seals the entrance, it then smooths out the entire surface into a nice blob. You can’t see the individual tubes nested against each other.

An unused tube makes up the mouth of our startled face; the mother must have perished before completing her task. The eyes are openings made by the freed babies once they matured and gnawed their way out of the nursery. The bump that makes up the nose marks where there is a baby that didn’t emerge, while the forehead and skull must contain more young’ns that won’t be seeing the light of day.

I have never seen a mud dauber re-use one of these nests, probably because there is the debris left by the baby, consisting of its pupal shell and the skeletons of its eight-legged snacks. After all, who’d want to make a nursery out of a catacomb/dumpster anyway?