Paper hanger

Yellow jackets and hornets make large, elaborate nests, interesting to find, but showing no sign of the internal structure. Paper wasps are less protective of their young. Lazier, more inclined to go off hunting, maybe.

I found one making her nest under the overhang of the toilets at Oyster Bay.

Golden paper wasp, Polistes aurifer, working on her nest.

These wasps build a single layer of cells hanging from a tiny stem, leaving them open to the air. The cells remain open while the young, one per cell, hatch and grow through several molts, with the adults watching over them and feeding them ground up caterpillars and other insects. (Maybe I shouldn't have called them lazy.)

When the larvae are ready to pupate, they spin their own silk cocoon to seal themselves in until they're ready to emerge as full-grown adults.

Fish and Wildlife Habitat

On the shore at Oyster Bay ...

Old sign, with rusty staple marks. The logs are just above the tide line around the bay, and protect a variety of salt-tolerant dune plants and grasshoppers.

Detritus, scrambled, tossed ashore, and left to bake in the sun at the highest tide line. Rockweed bladders, so dry they crunched like potato chips when touched, floating miniature "peas", the bladders of sargassum seaweed, bits of dried algae and eelgrass, all very dry. And these tiny tubes, unidentified.

Not present in the photo; a couple of scraps of plastic. I took that out and carried it away, along with a handful of other pieces and too many chunks of styrofoam.

The tubes are hollow; at home a darning needle slid in one end and out the other of a 1 cm. scrap; there was nothing inside to slow it down. Under a bright light and the microscope, the tube is papery, and yellowish, with those circular rings. It's 1.5 mm. in diameter. A worm tube, maybe? A structure from a molted crab? A segmented worm with no innards? I don't know.

I brought some of the dry rockweed home. Soaked in salt water for a few minutes, it became soft and pliant again, but slightly slimy. My hermit crabs thought it was delicious.

A twisty piece of bleached stump. And wildlife: look for the wasp and the baby maple tree.

The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get

Life is too busy. It's all good, but so busy! I still haven't processed the Secret Garden photos, and now I've got tons more; mating crabs, skylines and clouds, a wasp nest, invisible fish, a laughing log, a singing sparrow, and a critter that bit me. And the flash on my outdoor camera just went off (2 AM); no telling what I'll find in the memory tomorrow!

And then there's this:

Bald-faced hornet eye.

I found the hornet dead on my carpet. Too bad, but it gave me a chance to see how far I could zoom in, now that he's not moving. And won't sting. One bite is enough!

Now I'm hoping for a few boring days; maybe I can get "aheader" instead of behinder.

Yellow jacket. Well, a yellow-striped black body suit, anyhow.

Every time, almost, that I look at the bird bath these days, it has a wasp at the edge, getting a drink. Most are yellow-striped, like this one.

Either Dolichovespula arenaria, or Vespula pensylvanica. A yellowjacket, anyhow. Not on my birdbath; that's a blackberry blossom.

But yesterday, I noticed an almost black wasp, with a touch of blue striping. And then there are the orange ones that speed away as soon as I come near. And the little sand wasps that stung me last year. And the tiny ones that look like yellow fruit flies. And the black ones with a red belly.

All those live within a few feet of my door. And probably more that I haven't noticed yet.

Skunks and raccoons by night; wasps and chickadees and house finches by day. That's a busy birdbath. I'll have to start stalking it with the camera. (The bird cam doesn't notice cold-blooded insects; not in its contract, it claims. Lazy watchdog!)

Sugar cube spider

A wasp dropped in to visit, and I wanted to take his photo. He wasn't co-operative, though; he kept running away. So I moistened a sugar cube and put it down in front of him to attract his attention, and get him to stand still.

I stumbled, and dropped the cube on his nose, which put an end to the photo session. The wasp hid under the door sill.

Running wasp.

Not to waste my damp sugar cube, I put it on a shelf outside, to see what other insects might be attracted to it. A moth, perhaps?

Later, when I looked, someone else had come up with the same idea; a spider was laying in wait on that sugar cube.

Sugar cube spider

Zooming in, while she waited on the shady side of the cube.

Great minds think alike, they say.

Testing a new flash attachment

I have two flashes, hand-me-downs from my daughter, that fit the old Olympus camera. But I couldn't get them into the shoe on the little Nikon I'm using, until today; the problem was an almost invisible second adjusting ring. Once I found it, half a turn did the trick. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening testing the smaller flash out. (The big one is about three times the size of the camera, and twice its weight. It will work with a tripod, but live bugs and hermit crabs don't stay put that well.)

With a macro lens attached to the camera (even my little homemade item), the on-camera flash creates a dark shadow that covers the creature I'm focusing on. The extra angle on the new flash, five inches above the lens, makes a big difference. And I modified my light box to a light cone, to redirect the light. Then I took over a hundred test shots of a wasp that I caught months ago, and couldn't get any decent photos of.

A few sample shots:

Unidentified wasp, 1.5 cm long. Very dusty and dessicated, but not too damaged.

I love those yellow and black, curly antennae!

Zooming in. No depth of field at this range.

I haven't identified this, nor did I send any photos to BugGuide when it was new; my photos were just black on black, with no distinguishing features. I'll send in these, see what they say.

Tomorrow, we're going to Tsawwassen for a pottery sale. It will be Laurie's first outing since his fall. I hope the sun shines!