They’re back! It’s June, and mud-dauber wasps are in our garages and sheds, looking for spiders and building their clay nests. Remember those from childhood? Inquisitive insects, scary but harmless to us. Hondo Crouch wanted to have a party “when the mud-daubers come back to Luckenbach.”
You might notice two types of daubers in your garage – a robust, black-and-yellow wasp that builds a nest like a shapeless blob. And a bluish, fluttery wasp whose nest looks like the pipes in a pipe-organ.
And thereby hangs a tale.
An experiment with radioactive waste disposal at Oak Ridge National Laboratory drained some waste into big open soil pits (don’t ask). Mud-dauber wasps found mud in the pits, and used it to build their nests. Right in the little sheds that housed the radiation detection equipment.
Soon, the equipment was monitoring radioactive wasp nests, not the waste pits as they were supposed to.
Comes my friend Alvin S., who soon discovered that the blob nests might or might not be radioactive, depending on where the wasps got their clay. But -- the pipe-organ nests were NEVER radioactive.!
Could the pipe-organ wasp detect radiation, and avoid it?
Al spent a year studying those wasps, their behavior, their feeding habits, their clay selection. He found that the pipe-organ wasp was picky about clay, taking a little bit here and a little there. The blob-building wasp didn’t seem to care what kind of clay it was. Scooped it up and there it went.
Even so. Could the pipe-organ wasp detect harmful radiation?
Maybe…
Dac Crossley
June 19, 2010
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Prince Hamlet