Mystery Solved!

A wind chime hangs outside my bedroom; it makes a lovely yoga meditation bonging in a breeze, a more continuous sound in a storm.  One day, in the midst of a thunderstorm, I noticed it was moving, but hardly making any noise.  When the storm ended I went out to look at it wondering how a wind chime could break when I noticed bundled grass sticking out of each chime.  

Now who was the perpetrator of that?   Some overzealous nesting wren that just got carried away stuffing things? That didn’t seem that likely for never could a wren wiggle into this.  Nor a hummingbird, for nest building is really a pretty preprogrammed thing and they use spider webs, lichens etc.  and  not even the diminutive hummingbird could get itself into one of these tubes, so who?  Some one who was tired of the clanging?

Then, last week, as I was hanging out the clothes, along comes a lovely black wasp, one with a thread waist, and trailing from its legs, was a long piece of grass.  WOW, this is the guy!  And it heads for a small hole in an iron chair, disappears inside and slowly the blade of grass is drawn in behind it.  Amazing!  So, off to Google and it turns out, indeed it IS one of the thread-waisted wasps, Isodontia Mexicana, to be exact.

These are non-aggressive wasps that live throughout North America and make their nests in any existing long holes, a favorite supposedly being behind your storm windows or in my case in a wind chime. 

 They line the nest with grass, make separate chambers, laying one egg in each and then go off to hunt for a nice juicy grasshopper or katydid 

 which they will sting and paralyze, not kill, so that the emerging larvae can dine on fresh grasshopper as it grows.  Then, that larva will pupate and emerge as this lovely black wasp with amber wings.  Won’t I be lucky if I get to see that! 

So, no Zen like wind chime for a while, but I am hoping that when they emerge they must push out the plug, so once the grass is gone the music shall return.  The chair they it is nesting in might need to be sat in with caution for a while.  But a small price to pay for getting this window on an event I never knew about before.  Life is full of such marvelous mysteries and when one gets to be solved it is sweet indeed.