I have a love hate relationship with insects, I find them fascinating but also terrifying, I especially don’t want them on me or in my house.
I wrote “Insects don’t know” back in 2002/03 after working outside painting, it is surprising that after a few hundred years of dealing with humans, they have not yet evolved to figure out what a window is. Wet paint I can understand, quite a long way to die.
What is going on in an insect’s brain?
Take a tiger mosquito for example, these little feckers know exactly when you’re not looking, they know where’s the best place to bite you, and if you do notice them and go into defensive mode, they disappear and wait for you to relax again before coming back for more blood.
Moving on to Mason Wasps, these creatures are solitary wasps that don’t usually sting, their body looks like it is divided in two and there is an African legend that it was punished by God to prevent it from having children.
Anyway their thing is to build little clay houses, in which they lay an egg and then fill with paralysed spiders and caterpillars (yum).
I’ve had the misfortune of finding these little clay nests all over my apartment, they are quite fragile and if you happen to break one, all of the paralysed creatures fall out.
Once I removed one, and put it on the balcony, I observed the Mason Wasp who came to continue completing her torture chamber, but she was completely flummoxed by the absence of her nest, she behaved like a basic computer program, she had the exact coordinates of where her nest was, but she couldn’t actually look around and see that her nest had been moved.
hmmmm
To be continued…