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No murder hornets here - unless you're a cicada
By adamg on Sat, 07/18/2020 - 10:07pm
Mary Ellen photographed one of several two-inch-long cicada killer wasps flitting around Millennium Park in West Roxbury yesterday afternoon. "They were quite impressive buzzing around," she says, adding they're relatively harmless - except to cicadas - they can sting, but usually won't unless they feel threatened.
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Comments
I have a ton of them on my front patio
There were less last year but they are spreading. Apparently will keep on growing in number every year unless I do something about it. Don’t really mind them because they really aren’t aggressive but I’m worried that one of the kids will get stung.
yikes
I hope Mary Ellen was using a lens with lots of reach
Millennium Park is getting
Millennium Park is getting creepy.
Murder hornets started on the West Coast right?
And they're still there
This isn't a Japanese hornet. (The "murder hornet" thing is stupid and overblown, unless you're a European honeybee.)
This is a cicada-killer, and we have them all over the east coast. They're really cool -- they paralyze cicadas and then drag them back to their nest, which sometimes involves hauling them up trees and then gliding down in the desired direction.
'really cool'?
"Canvassing tree trunks and lower limbs, the wasp stings its prey, turns the victim on its back, straddles it, and drags it or glides with it to the burrow. Each cell is furnished with at least one cicada (sometimes two or three) and a single egg before being sealed off. The egg hatches two or three days later and the larva feeds four to ten days, until only the cicada's outer shell remains. "
So getting paralyzed and buried alive with an egg which hatches the creature which will kill you and feed on your corpse is 'really cool'? Are you Paul Ritter from 'Aliens'?
I don't know who Paul Ritter is
but I'm a biology enthusiast, so take that however you will.
(Also, it's not *my* corpse. I'm not a cicada.)
"It's not *my* corpse"
Not yet, anyway...
Cicida
AKA: The 17 year plague, Thunderbug... The Noise.
I welcome our new cicada killer wasp overlords.
Generally harmless to people,
Generally harmless to people, but they like to leave big mounds of dirt where they burrow. And they are really, really curious, so while they are very unlikely to try to hurt you, they will absolutely fly right up in your face to check you out.