I was sitting on my front porch when I noticed a little wasp hoving about in an annoyed manner. I got up, and she quickly landed on my chair and started poking around in the little decorative holes drilled in the wood.
What is she up to?
Oh, just shoving a live, but paralyzed, catepillar into one of the holes.
All finished now -- she flies off. Probably to get another catepillar. When the hole if full, she cap it with mud, as you can see she's already done with several of the other holes in the chair.
Before she caps them, though, she'll lay some eggs. They'll hatch into little baby wasps, which will munch happily on the still living, but paralyzed caterpillars -- they carefully eat the vital organs last, so the catepillars don't die and start rotting.
Kind of gruesome, but mostly cool... besides, I think those caterpillars had been munching on my roses, so they deserve to be eaten alive by wasp larvae.
