{"id":33558,"date":"2024-07-27T07:37:06","date_gmt":"2024-07-27T14:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=33558"},"modified":"2024-07-27T07:37:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-27T14:37:06","slug":"pulp-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=33558","title":{"rendered":"Pulp collection"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Thursday, the wildfire smoke cleared enough that I sat outside and watched the lake. But, soon my attention was distracted by some wasps that began to pay attention to my aged deck furniture. What were they doing?<\/p>\n<p>I had seen the activity a decade before, but with a different type of wasp. Then it was the <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=10648\">European Paper Wasp<\/a>; this time it was the Western Yellowjacket (<em>Vespula pensylvanica<\/em>). I am sure multiple wasps are active on my furniture each year, but I fail to notice.<\/p>\n<p>They were collecting wood, which when mixed with their saliva, is the pulp that makes their hive. The temporary problem I had was that the Western Yellowjacket usually doesn&#8217;t make a hive, but makes a nest in cavities in the ground. However, a nest is made of more than the outer hive covering; it also contains the hexagonal cylinders which hold the eggs. It is for the building of these that the yellowjacket was collecting wood pulp.<\/p>\n<p>I note that these wasps have a particularly painful sting. However, I was not near their defended nest, and I avoided close contact.<\/p>\n<p>A Western Yellowjacket collects wood pulp to build the enclosures for the queen&#8217;s eggs.\u00a0<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-33561\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/westernyellowjacket240725as.jpg\" alt=\"\" onclick=\"return false\" onmousedown=\"return false\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This was being collected by workers: unreproductive females. The wood loss is trivial.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-33560\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/westernyellowjacket240725bs2.jpg\" alt=\"\" onclick=\"return false\" onmousedown=\"return false\" width=\"720\" height=\"720\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The yellowjacket flies off with some pulp.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-33559\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/westernyellowjacket240725cs.jpg\" alt=\"\" onclick=\"return false\" onmousedown=\"return false\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Thursday, the wildfire smoke cleared enough that I sat outside and watched the lake. But, soon my attention was distracted by some wasps that began to pay attention to my aged deck furniture. What were they doing? I had &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=33558\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bugs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33558"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33564,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33558\/revisions\/33564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}