A foraging bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) gives us a nice top-side view as she maneuvers to the nest entrance. This wasp returns to the nest with a large chunk of food - and flies by the memorable ringed pattern of the business end of another bald-faced hornet working at the entrance. This bald-faced hornet returns to a very busy nest entrance with a green-colored bolus of plant fiber for building and repairs. The colorful variations of fibers chewed from different sources creates an interesting patch-work pattern to the nest. This image gives a unique comparison of the difference in the size between the worker wasps and the much larger queen. This queen (facing head up) is busying herself with some task at the entrance.
0 Comments
Here are another four images from my summer project -- documenting the bald-faced hornet nest in our yard.
They are intriguing insects, and it has been fun learning more about them as I've watched & photographed them -- from the intricate details of their bodies, to how they tuck in their legs until just fractions of a second before they land. Judging from the speed of my motor drive (how far they fly between shots), they're often still traveling a couple feet per second in the last 1/2 foot of their approach to the nest! One of my goals has been to capture decent images of them in flight, so it's fun to share these with you. Let me know what you think! Stay tuned - there's more to come! The air conditioning brigadeHere's the entrance to the Bald-faced hornet's nest on a warm summer day.
The nest is buzzing with activity, inside and out; foragers are coming and going, carrying out their regular duties collecting food, water, and building material. The 6 hornets seen here, surrounding the entrance, are on cooling duty; anchored in place and fanning their wings to whip up a breeze, cooling down the busy nest. Bald-faced hornets have one of the larger colonies, as wasps go, with often between 400 to 700 individuals working to maintain the nest, feed the colony and prepare for the future. The queens are the only ones that live through the winter, hiding in leaf litter or under loose tree bark. They start up the next year's nest in early spring, doing the initial building, raising and feeding young until the brood is large enough to allow her to concentrate on just laying eggs. Over the last few years, most of the bald-faced hornet nests we've found in our yard have been safely out of reach while we're mowing. A few weeks ago I discovered one that wasn't! Ok, it is a safety hazard, but it does lend itself to some exciting photography! This image shows two bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata) adding on to the outside protective cover of the nest. The visual design is really intriguing to me. A closer look reveals that each subtly colored streaked segment is one hornet's work with one tiny ball of chewed up wood fiber - the different colors coming from various sources. That's a lot of work! And each individual's effort does make for a unique overall design. Zooming in on the picture shows a little more detail. Here you can begin to see the individual wood fibers of the dried sections - and the bolus of chewed up pulp this hornet is working from to add its new bit. Zooming in even a little more... ...gives us a better look at the ball of pulp under the hornet's "chin." Finger-like mouthparts (called maxillary palps) hold the ball in place and help feed it into the hornet's jaws (mandibles) where the pulp is "chewed" into the existing, older segment, and flattened paper-thin to build up this hornet's section of work.
Kind of surprising, what you can see up-close, isn't it? |
Closer Viewsis my photo-invitation to slow down and soak in all the wonder and beauty woven through creation. Join for email updates!
Archives
August 2022
Categories
All
|