The beautiful and the damned

Wasp nest …

There was a thread on SBAi a year or so ago in which “Kieth” asked for advice on keeping wasps. Kieth never returned to the thread, but there were a number of increasingly surreal contributions on waspkeeping. I was searching through a pile of equipment stacked in a corner and discovered this wasps nest attached to an old Perspex crownboard. The nest is paper-thin, made out of wood pulp (and presumably wasp saliva), beautifully crafted with a double layered entrance and a cluster of larvae in the ‘roof’ (the picture shows the nest upside down).

If you look carefully in the image below you can see the developing larvae. There were perhaps 15 or 20 of them, each occupying a small hexagonal cell … but remember these will return later in the season to wreak havoc with weaker nucs or late season mating nucs.

Developing larvae …