Often seen as pests, wasps have an important role in pollination (especially figs) and can be used for biocontrol. Social wasps make their paper-like nests out of broken down pieces of wood and other material. Here I have the images of a nest with plane and cross-polarized light.
That’s beautiful and dangerous. Fantastic work.. can you say something about what materials might these be. My assumption was that they chew and spit out a mixture of things to build nests – is that correct?
Keep exploring.
Manu
Hello,
From what I understand, the wasps chew the wood fibres and these fibres (usually from older wood, fences etc) and their saliva are combined to make the nests.
The nest had been taken away a few days earlier and some parts of it had fallen to the ground. I waited a few days to make sure no wasps around and then collected it, so no danger in this case 🙂