An Australian woman made a desperate call for help after she was horrified by a terrifying discovery in her laundry room.
The woman shared a series of photos on Facebook showing a mound of what looks like dirt around the globe of light.
‘Does anyone know what this is? Can I get a product from Bunnings or are I going to get attacked by wasps or something?’ she wrote.
‘Can someone help me?’
Social media users were also horrified by the strange discovery.
An Australian woman made a desperate call for help after making a strange discovery in her laundry room.
‘What the hell is that?!’ said one person.
“I would move,” wrote another.
“Oh honey, this is when you burn the house down and run like hell,” a third person commented.
Others wondered how the woman had just made the discovery.
“My clothes are outside and I hardly ever use the light,” she explained.
I have sprayed it with fly repellent. Nothing came. I threw it in a bucket and it came off. I just have to take out the light globe. It could be complicated.
Alexander Mikheyev, a professor at the Australian National University, said yahoo The nest belonged to a mud daub wasp.
He then went on to say that “overall, this is pretty typical.”
“Wasps tend to build their nests in protected areas, like under eaves or under a roof, so I think the location makes a lot of sense,” he said.
“What was unusual is that the wasp covered the base of the bulb with a little more clay.”
The expert then explained that mud daubers actively capture their prey and paralyze them.
“Once they paralyze the prey, the larvae develop in these paralyzed prey,” he said.
The woman shared a series of photos on Facebook showing a mound of what looks like dirt around the globe of light.
‘Then they will hunt down the spider (for example) and paralyze it.
“The spider will not die, but will be eaten by the larvae in such a way that they will eat the essential non-vital organs first and remain fresh throughout their development cycle.”
While this sounds a little “grim,” you probably won’t have a colony of wasps chasing you, Mikheyev said.
He added that in general, wasp stings are painful but not threatening, and they won’t actually attack you unless you aggressively threaten them.
‘However, if the wasp is active, building the nest, and you try to harass it, it may attack you in self-defense. But most of the time, wasps avoid conflict,” he stated.
He then explained what you should do if you unexpectedly come across a mud nest.
‘I would check that it’s not active and then you could scrape it quite safely. Maybe with some kind of sword,’ he said.
“There might be a little bit of residue left and you might have to experiment with some solvents to clean it up because they stick pretty well with a mixture of mud and saliva.”
Professor Alexander Mikheyev, from the Australian National University’s Research School of Biology, told Yahoo that the nest belonged to a mud-painting wasp.
Mikheyev said the nests are “harmless” as the wasps do not stay inside because they need to go find food.
He recommended leaving the nests where they are so as not to damage them.
“If you scrape it off and put it somewhere else, it’s potentially exposed to the elements and the ants will actively seek them out and eat them,” he said.
“While people may vary in how they feel about this and their property, I let the wasps hatch and then remove the rest.”
