Mud daubing wasps

Photo: Alastair Ross, Google Images
For the next couple of months we shall be discovering the little mud capsules constructed from the muddy spit of mud dauber wasps. They build them everywhere - on the insides of car doors, under cusions we have on the day bed, even inside shoes that are left outside. I stuck one of my hooves in a shoe yesterday and felt lots of crumbly, gritty stuff and on extraction, found six of these little muddy cocoons inside. As I scraped them out several broke and they were full of small, paralysed spiders, as this phot shows. I'd forgotten that this wasp searches for and then paralyses soiders which it places inside the cocoon so that when wasp junior hatches it has a fresh supply of food to last it until it emerges from its mud wrap as a new wasp. Its the first time that I had actually seen this in the flesh myself. There must be a very large number of small, nervous spiders at our place at the moment!