Hey girls Thanks for thinking of me. This one is a bit tricky.
Can you give me some clues? Can you tell me what it is made of? It looks like mud. Am I right?
And I need to know how big it is. Are each of those little pods about as big as your thumb, maybe a bit fatter? Is it on a brick and was the brick in a corner sheltered space? And if you look in those pods are they just one pod or do they look like they are connected to each other?
My guess is that you have found the cocoons of a a mud dauber wasp. They make mud homes usually in a sheltered, sunny spot on a house or sometimes a tree. The female wasps fill their pods with spiders that they have stung to put to sleep and the spiders become food for the eggs that the wasps lay in those pods in the fall. Sometimes birds will peck at their cocoons and you will see lots of holes in them. If the birds don't find them, the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the spiders and mature into adult wasps. Here's a picture of one of their cocoons and if you ask your mum to google you can see lots more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mud_dauber_nest.jpg
There's another kind of mud dauber in Ontario which is sometimes called an organ pipe mud dauber and they make long tubes of mud instead of the little fat ones you have.
You can sometimes see wasps at wet areas gathering mud. They carry little balls of mud in their mandibles to build their cocoons. Do you have a pond, creek, or river near you?
Let me know if you think my guess is right! thanks for asking Karen
1 comment:
Hey girls
Thanks for thinking of me. This one is a bit tricky.
Can you give me some clues?
Can you tell me what it is made of? It looks like mud. Am I right?
And I need to know how big it is. Are each of those little pods about as big as your thumb, maybe a bit fatter?
Is it on a brick and was the brick in a corner sheltered space?
And if you look in those pods are they just one pod or do they look like they are connected to each other?
My guess is that you have found the cocoons of a a mud dauber wasp. They make mud homes usually in a sheltered, sunny spot on a house or sometimes a tree. The female wasps fill their pods with spiders that they have stung to put to sleep and the spiders become food for the eggs that the wasps lay in those pods in the fall. Sometimes birds will peck at their cocoons and you will see lots of holes in them. If the birds don't find them, the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the spiders and mature into adult wasps.
Here's a picture of one of their cocoons and if you ask your mum to google you can see lots more
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mud_dauber_nest.jpg
There's another kind of mud dauber in Ontario which is sometimes called an organ pipe mud dauber and they make long tubes of mud instead of the little fat ones you have.
You can sometimes see wasps at wet areas gathering mud. They carry little balls of mud in their mandibles to build their cocoons. Do you have a pond, creek, or river near you?
Let me know if you think my guess is right!
thanks for asking
Karen
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