wasps are angels on earth.

god above told me this via divine communication so you should really listen to me.

as a child i was terrified of all bugs, especially stinging things. i'm still kind of scared of bugs. i've never been one to kill bugs (minus flies in the house if my idiote cats didn't get to them first) though. grasshoppers and crickets will probably always scare the shit out of me. i've had recurring nightmares about them ganging up on me since i was a child. their meatiness and the soulless way they stare at you is discomforting. maybe someday i'll work through that but i have a lot of other shit on my plate.

i've never in my life been stung by anything. one time when i was at the waterpark as a kid, a chunky solitary wasp (?) was having a sip of my dr. pepper and i wanted it and gently shooed it off and it just bumbled on away like "oopsie sorrey my bad." this was interesting to me cause i had psyched myself up thinking This Is The Day I'm Going To Get Stung but i didn't. i wasn't violent toward it and we were chill, it was just an accident. little fellow didn't know any better!

i was still scared of wasps after this though, mostly because one got in my hair one time when i was a teenager taking out the trash, but the fear is moreso Bug Stuck In My Hair and idk if i'm getting over that one lol.

last summer there were some paper wasps living around my porch but not on it and coming in from my porch one got in the house on accident. i lived alone at the time and was kind of panicking cause i didn't want to try to kill it bc if i miss i might get stung and i Really don't wanna chase a wasp around my house, so I was just trying to shoo it out. my sweet orange boy cat, while i had the door ajar, booped her out gently without hurting her at all. it was awesome.

my girlfriend really likes bugs. she's a Bug Girl. so she's taught me a lot about them and it's definitely given me a huge respect for...most...bugs. maybe. some of them, at least. i also need to add that this spring i had an Incident in which a bigass spider decided to live in my car and only show itself when i was going 70mph down the highway and i could never find it and it lived in my car for a MONTH. so when i learned that wasps kill spiders i was Pro Wasp. i'm still not rockin with spiders.

but anyways, she told me that wasps can remember faces. so if you fuck with them and get away, and they see you again, it's on site. but if you're Kind, they Remember.

early this summer, two sweet paper wasps were building a nest on my porch. it was the opposite corner from the door, and i had a basil plant i didn't want bugs messing with, so i allowed it so long as they didn't come in the house, which they never did. we watched them for weeks as they built their beautiful nest and slept together every night, and unfortunately, the night after The Sex of their lives...the nest was gone. it had made it through numerous late spring/early summer storms, but either a storm or wind or a bird got to it.

i was heartbroken. i felt like tony soprano with his ducks. i missed my sweet hardworking lesbian wasp couple.

but then...maybe like, a month or so ago, i saw a blue dirt dauber floating around. i still have yet to find her nest - it wasn't on my porch - but i was so glad to see her there, especially after learning that dirt daubers are the perfect predator for spiders!!! she was floating around for a few weeks, i would say hi to her as i did to my other wasp friends, and then...

i go to water my plants after a couple weeks of her in my orbit, and a micro-swarm of black flying bugs fly off the string lights on my porch before i can get a good look at what they are. after peeking inside and doing some investigating (asking gf) i realized it was baby waspies!! little baby dirt daubers that had just reached their adult stage and hadn't yet found homes.

there's not a lot of research done on dirt daubers, specifically their behavior. every internet source i could find said that the boys live in the adult stage for around 2 weeks before fucking and dying, and the girls live up to six weeks, in which they build a nest or inhabit an empty one and lay their eggs. that seems to be the extent of it. dirt daubers are solitary wasps, and the girls usually branch off to find or make their own nests within a day or two, while the boys will have "boy's night" sleepovers in a little huddle every night until they die but may go off and do whatever during the day. here are my observations, since i've gotten the privilege of seeing them fairly up-close for the past three weeks.

• the girls and the boys will hang out with each other during the day. as far as i can tell, the girls spent the night in The Huddle for the first few nights, but i can't find where they stay at night now.
• they REALLY like my fairy lights (which are never on) for some reason. not sure why.
• the boys are still here, very much alive. again, it's been three weeks. idk.
• they do get -slightly- bigger. even though the adult stage is their final, 'fully-grown' stage, the females especially do get slightly larger. tbh i can't quite tell if the dudes are bigger or if they're the same size.

that's kind of all i have to contribute. below are some shitty zoomed-in phone photos i took of them. i -believe- they're chalybion californicum/blue mud daubers, but the blue sheen (seen mostly in the females whereas the males are pretty much just solid black) doesn't show up on camera great, at least not with what i'm using. i really like wasps and i'm so grateful that they trust me enough to allow me to observe them and coexist with them.