Okinawa mud wasp
The Okinawa mud wasp is a potter wasp. The mother builds a nest out of mud with little rooms, each with a round opening like the neck of a tiny pot. She fills every room with food for her baby.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
One mud nest has 1 to 8 rooms, built side by side in one or two rows.
The mother puts 3 to 10 caterpillars into a single room before she seals it.
Her egg hangs from the wall of the room on a little thread of silk.
The egg hatches in a couple of days, and the young wasp flies out of its room about a month later.
A yellow band on its thin waist helps tell it apart from a wasp that looks very similar.
Most asked questions about Okinawa mud wasp
?What does the Okinawa mud wasp feed its babies?
Caterpillars. The mother packs 3 to 10 of them into each mud room.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Delta esuriens
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- Asia
Where the facts come from
- Delta esuriens (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Yogendra Joshi. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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