This weekend we went on a bee hunt, well hornet hunt. Kevin and I just had a discussion about whether it was a hornet or a wasp. Apparently a hornet is a type of wasp. So we were both right. Jordan and Torrin had spotted a gigantic paper wasp (hornet) nest hanging from the shop eves a few days ago when they were in the hot tub.
This is the nest.
First Kevin attacked the nest with a cheap can of wasp spray. Then he decided to really piss them off and squirted them with the pressure washer. It knocked down the paper outer structure and dislodged a couple layers of the honeycomb with lots of cells for new hornets.
Here is one of the layers still attached.
This is a close up of one of the layers that fell off. It had hornets in different stages of development. The empty cells in the center had been vacated by mature hornets. The white bubbles are cocoons with wiggly hornets in them. On the out edges are the hornet larvae that have not made cocoons yet. We extracted one of the cocoons with a wiggly hornet from a cell.
Close up of the cocoon with wiggly hornet.
We decided to set this hornet free so we cut open his cocoon. It was made of pretty tough stuff so it took some effort to open an end for the hornet to escape.
Here is the hornet crawling out of his cocoon.
After a difficult C-section, Kevin and I gave birth to a hornet. It stumbled around for a while then we lost interest and went in the house. I was planning on showing the girls the rest of the layer with cocoons but a wild animal stole the hornet hatchery during the night. And so ends the bee (hornet) story.
As a side note we did find two other nests but they were last years models and had long since been vacated.
