Tag: nature as art

All summer long Ms. Jeannie’s house has been under construction. A new addition (or wing) as Mr. Jeannie Ology likes to call it, is being added just off the second floor guest room.  Here’s a photograph of the work that is being done…

The workers have been hard at their project since early May. When Ms. Jeannie first noticed the activity, their scaffolding was the size of a golf ball. Now, it is the size of a 20lb. Thanksgiving turkey…

Ms. Jeannie thinks the architect on this crew was inspired by Frank Llyod Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in NYC …

Or the turban style head pieces seen often in India and the Middle East…

Alas, there are no hats to be worn on this job site! The construction crew at Ms. Jeannie’s have a style all their own.  These guys are bald faced hornets – tough little critters that are actually part of the wasp family.

They build their nests out of strips of chewed up wood and saliva, which wraps (literally!) around the interior comb protecting the queen and her babies.  Up to 400 wasps can live in a nest this big – and from all the buzzing and commotion going on, in and around this nest, Ms. Jeannie is sure the structure is at capacity.

When the nest was about the size of a grapefruit, the pest company came out to look at it. They said because of the positioning – between the house and the gutter – that it wouldn’t get much bigger. Ha! It has doubled about five times since that day.  The pest company offered two solutions. They could come geared up in hazmat suits and “dust” the nest which may or may not get rid of them all or we could all just wait until Fall when the weather turns cold and they would abandon the nest themselves.

Ms. Jeannie liked option 2 the best. The nest is high up off the ground and bald faced hornets eat mosquitos and flys and caterpillar types in the garden. They only get troublesome if you bother them and since they are now residing in an out of the way area, Ms. Jeannie is not really concerned. Plus, she thinks it might be fun to see just how much bigger this nest could actually get and to see if she can take it down and inspect it more closely once all the wasps leave in Autumn.

So this is a TOO BE CONTINUED post. We’ll check back in a couple of months for our own private unveiling of the Guggenheim Georgia! in the meantime, if you’ve had any encounters with our construction crew in the past please share your comments!