Phenology Post: Shade, Heir to Jade

A question, Gentle Readers. Would you send your monthly (or bimonthly or quarterly) $5 to this web site if it looked more like this Real Phenology Blog?

https://www.poorwillsalmanack.com/2020/08/phenology-daybook-august-3-2020/

Browsing through that guy's notes from the Midwest, I noted a synchronicity. Yesterday morning a new Grass-Carrying Wasp was asserting her claim to the office.

She flew smack into the Lasko fan, which was running at the time, fell to the bottom and spent some time checking herself for permanent injuries. There didn't seem to be any. She's young; she's probably in love, whatever that feels like to insects that seem to live in loose pairs; the world is her oyster. She flew back to the desk lamp and sat there surveying her territory. Summoning her mate? Watching for a mosquito to eat? Checking out her human companion? Possibly all of the above? I admired the way her iridescent wings and skin shaded from purplish behind to coppery-green in front, and thought, "That can be her name. Shade, heir to Jade."

There's no reason to imagine that wasps have names for themselves, and reason to doubt that they ever know they've been given names by humans, but it does help us keep track if for some reason we're watching an individual wasp. My reason for watching Shade is to make sure I don't inadvertently crush her, or her mate, who showed himself an hour or two later. (He's less outrageously disproportionate to her than the male Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter; smaller and less iridescent, but easily recognized as a wasp rather than a skinny fly or oversized gnat.)

When we think of wasps many of us are conditioned to think "sting," but the mud-dauber tribe of wasps don't sting. Some do have pointy bits they can use to stab in self-defense. They don't have any noticeable amount of venom and they're not aggressive. They're actually very congenial office companions. They eat gnats, mosquitoes, and other nuisance insects, and stuff them into the little houses they build around their eggs.

Jade was the wasp who actually became familiar enough, over the weeks of her life, to dare to perch on my eyebrow and pick a gnat right out of my eyelashes. Comparing the efficiency of her tiny claws with the clumsiness of my own thick fingers, I was charmed.

The daubers are considered solitary wasps but, since the paper wasps left and I've had the opportunity to share the office with daubers, I've come to suspect that they live in pairs. At least there's been a resident female who obviously learned her way around the office and, after she's taken over, there's been a male who's learned his way around too. Males may be slower learners than females, or different males may approach before one is chosen to move in; I'm not sure. In any case it's been obvious to my unaided and rather slow-focussing eyes that I've been sharing the office with one pair of daubers for about two months at a time during the warm season. The weeks between generations have been gnat-infested times when I've missed having wasps in residence.

The office windows have screens on them. The female wasps are too big to slip through the mesh, but are able to slither between the screens and their frames. Gnats can slip through the mesh, or around door frames, as can the male Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter, and the horrid invasive "tiger" mosquitoes. (Native mosquito species probably could slip through the mesh, too, if they were motivated to bite humans, which they're not. They occasionally bite Mother but they really prefer to annoy the cats. They also annoyed the chickens, when we had chickens. Tiger mosquitoes, unfortunately, seem to prefer to bite me before they bite any other living thing. I can still usually see them and kill them before they bite; I'm not looking forward to growing old with this species of nuisance insects, but I'm not going to start a Vicious Spray Cycle.)

Earlier this spring there was a problem with dauber overpopulation. I had noticed, while the paper wasps were the dominant species, that daubers used to seem to be annoying little animals that were always flying out in people's faces, although they lost more than they gained by this threat display. I had then observed, after the paper wasp colony collapsed, that the daubers only seemed to do the threat display when other wasps were about. Presumably their motivation was to impress other wasps rather than humans--my family would leave them alone if they didn't fly at us, but have tended to swat them like flies when they did. When there was only one pair of daubers in the office I noticed them mainly by the absence of gnats and mosquitoes. This spring I noticed both a Steel-Blue Cricket Hunter and a Grass Carrier, and they were a nuisance, one or another of them flying at me almost every day. I put up with them but was not pleased. When they reached the end of their short lifespan I saw why the territorial displays had escalated. Three female Cricket Hunters and two female Grass Carriers all expired within a week. They all seemed to have arrived about the same time, so presumably they all belonged to one generation and died old.

Unfortunately, like humans, daubers seem willing to put up with crowding and stress in exchange for the things that motivate them to settle where they do. For daubers that seems to include proximity both to damp clean earth (mud is the main component of the little nests, or huts, they build) and to larger animals that attract mosquitoes (which they eat). A human home located about twenty yards from a stream seems to suit both of these species just fine. The population is probably destined to increase, and the wasps' compatibility with humans...well...my mother is the one who feels most nervous about daubers' displays, and my mother probably won't have another summer at the Cat Sanctuary in any case.

Meanwhile, one pair of Grass Carriers is nice to have in an office, around the time songbirds are molting (and thus not flying and chasing mosquitoes). I welcome Shade.