Nature's Work of Art

Nature can be pretty awesome until you get stung by it.

Bill took the boat down to the lower lot this afternoon and to do some mowing.  He came back up and told me there was this work of art that I just had to come see and 'don't forget to bring your camera'.

The following are pictures of what was there and then the research on the internet to verify what exactly we were looking out.

 Isn't it the most amazing thing you have ever seen?

Back side.....

...and the top.

It is really gorgeous.  Our first thoughts were that it was a paper wasp nest but this belongs to the baldface hornets.  The hornets can be very aggressive so Bill came away very lucky when he mowed under the tree and wasn't stung.  His one comment was, "There sure were a lot of wasps".  This was before he noticed it.  There is a second nest higher in the tree which is smaller than this one.

The following is from the internet:

Baldfaced Hornets

"Hornets are a social wasp related to the yellowjackets and paper wasps. These all live in colonies similar to those of honey bees and ants. The hornet colony is contained inside the nest constructed of paper-like material made from chewed wood fibers mixed with saliva. The nest is composed of 3 or 4 tiers of combs within a thick, multilayered outer shell. A single opening at the bottom allows the hornets to fly in and out.

Baldfaced hornets are large, black insects about 7/8 of an inch long with white to cream-colored markings on the front of the head and at the end of the abdomen. Like all wasps, bees and ants, hornets have a complete life cycle of four stages: egg, larva, pupa and adult. The larva is a legless grub reared within cells in the nest. Hornets are beneficial predators that feed on other insects, particularly filth flies and blow flies.

A colony of social wasps (hornets, yellowjackets and paper wasps) lasts only 1 year. Each nest is built from scratch each year and the previous year's nest can not be reused. Queens are the only members of the colony able to survive the winter. In April or May, each queen selects a suitable location, constructs a small nest and begins raising sterile daughter offspring. These workers take over the duties of enlarging and maintaining the nest, foraging for food and caring for the offspring while the queen functions only to produce more eggs.

At first colony growth is slow, but growth increases rapidly by mid-summer as successive broods of workers emerge. Peak worker population is 100 to 400 hornets by the end of the summer. In the fall, males and new queens are produced. These leave the nest, mate and the fertilized queens hibernate. The remainder of the workers, the old queen and the males die of old age or freezing temperatures."

Since it is only us and our neighbors who have access to this area we are toying with the idea of leaving the nest and see what happens to it in the winter.  

A day shouldn't go by that you don't take the time to learn something new.