Cicada Killer Wasps. "WTH?!" was my first reaction when told this is what I had killed the other night. I am still freaking out about this.. And totally dumbfounded as to why I have not heard of or seen these ever before. We found three of these big nasty things on my lilac bushes in the back yard. Doug killed them with wasp killer and started disecting. We determined one was a female and the other two were males. They were mating in our yard. Well thanks but no thanks.. take that somewhere else, preferrably someone elses yard. I did lots of research on these suckers. They specifically hunt cicadas. The females dig a hole in the ground which then leads to several chambers where eggs are laid. She then goes out, hunts down by stinging and paralyzing a cicada, brings it back to the nest, put one-2 cicads in each chamber with an egg, seals the chamber and then seals the main hole. The egg hatches, the larvae feed on the cicada, spin a coccoon, hibernate over winter and come out of the ground in the spring as an adult. Males only mate, dont hunt and dont take care of the nests. The females will only attack someone if provocked, felt harmed or felt the next was being bothered. And the stinger on this momma is HUGE! Lets just say.. death to me. I am highly allergic and only want to imagine (not experience) what would happen. So I now was around the yard with shoes, never barefoot and am always on the look out for nests.
Here is one of the many websites I read about these monsterous creatures....
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Here are the three killed in our yard, males on the left, female on the right. and her stinger that Doug pulled out in the middle connected to guts. YUCK!
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This is a nest found in a friends yard. She sees new ones made daily. You can kill them with boiling water if you dont have spray.
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