Organ-pipe Mud Dauber Wasp

Here's an Organ-pipe Mud Dauber wasp I met back in August. Their iridescent blue wings make them a strong candidate for Shiny Insect of the Week.

They get the "mud dauber" part of their name by building nests for their offspring from mud and get the "organ pipe" part of their name from the shape of those nests: vertical "pipes" adjacent to one another.

When I first saw this black-bodied, blue-winged wasp, I thought of the Great Black Digger Wasp. I think the biggest difference you might be able to see is that the Organ-pipe Mud Dauber has white on the lower part of their back legs, something you shouldn't see in the Great Black Digger Wasp. On iNaturalist they do list the Great Black Digger Wasp as being an insect that can be mistaken for an Organ-pipe Mud Dauber.

Note the mud on the ground. Since it's the females that gather the mud, this is presumably a female. She's probably looking at the mud thinking "this will do nicely". After she's built her "organ pipe" nest, she'll have to stock it with food for when her kids (she calls them larvae) hatch and start eating. What's on her grocery list? Mostly orb-weaver spiders. (We typically think of spiders as eating insects, but what goes around comes around.)

The male actually does have a role to play; while she's out gathering mud/spiders, he's back at the "organ pipe" nest, guarding it from food-stealing thieves and from parasitic wasps that potentially prey on their larvae. (He doesn't have a stinger so I'm not sure how he mounts this defense. He can probably bite, but maybe other bugs simply can't tell he's a male and are afraid he might be a female with a stinger.)

August 10, 2022 at Lord Stirling Park
Photo 228540461, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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