I noticed some busy little wasps creating this apartment complex just outside my studio door sometime last year, but I have a live and let live attitude about most insects that stay outside.
Besides, they’ve worked so hard on it, and the remodeling never seems to stop. The tenants haven’t bothered me, not even when I accidentally knocked the palm frond foundation over yesterday when I was moving an attached vine aside.
They are some variety of paper wasps, and despite their bad reputation as real stingers, they’ve ignored our comings and goings. Maybe they even feel safer being so close to the house. (The palmetto branches abut our studio window, right next to the back door.)
From the little bit of research I’ve done, they seem like good parents, foraging for caterpillars and so on for their developing young. You have to admire that.
A couple years ago I had a small paper wasp nest on the front porch that I happened to be looking at just as a jaybird swooped in and took it away in his beak. If I hadn’t witnessed it I never would’ve believed it.
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