"The newspaper was already rolled up before anyone asked what she was actually doing up there.
What she was doing was hunting black widows. The mud dauber is the long, thin wasp building clay pipes under your porch roof, and she is nobody's problem. She has no hive to guard, no swarm to call, and no interest in your lemonade. The males cannot sting at all. The females almost never do, and you nearly have to press one against your skin to manage it. You can stand a foot away and watch her work all afternoon.
The work is the part worth watching. She packs each mud pipe with spiders, paralyzed and stacked like cordwood, one egg laid on the pile. Black widows are a documented favorite. The spider you will not reach into the woodpile for, she carries home before lunch.
So those clay pipes on the shed wall are not damage. They are a nursery, and a running record of every spider that never made it into your house.
The wasp costume is a bluff. The tenant is a spider trap. 🕷️" "MudDauber #Wasp #Nature
