charliekilo wrote:


Dry bare earth is one of the cicada wasps favorite site in which to burrow.
My deck is only about a foot above ground and dry, hot, dense bare earth
lies underneath and the cicada killers L-O-V-E it. Over the last three
years, they've come back annually for at least a six week stay. They look
intimidating but never bother us. They're even kind of fun to watch - they
almost seem to have personalities and are very attentive.

CK
Austin, TX

Thanks for sharing that experience. When I buy a new lot of land to landscape
I generally have some truckloads of fill dirt which is called a road mix for
it is
about 50% dirt and 50% gravel. I am building a concrete block garage and had
a load of this for backfill dumped into a big mound. And while shoveling some
of this backfill I ran into this huge wasp. It is tough shovelling because the
clay and gravel but the wasp seems to like that composition.

I like to use that roadmix as patches in the lawn to make the mowing easier.

And decided that under the garage eave is a dry spot that gets little rain and
will
put a mound of roadmix in order to get a nice large population of these wasps
because my fruit trees have too many cicadas.

I wonder if some sort of arrangement of concrete block would entice these
wasps
as a home. Where you put a row of block in line with the apricot trees and
fill the block holes with a gravel, sand, clay mix. I suppose these wasps do
not like it when ants are nearby. And they seem to like a sunny spot.

Archimedes Plutonium,
whole entire Universe is just one big atom where dots
of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies