While waiting for the melancholic monkey yesterday evening, I found my duck pottering at the junction of Tank Road and Orchard Road, in front of the [email protected] (the former Picturehouse) hoping to spot pretty SMU students in slipless sundresses slicking ice cream that's dripping down their necks. A fair bit of works is still taking place there, and parts of the ground lie disturbed, exposing a little corridor of a coarse sandbank between the pavement and the canvas-covered equipment.
Unfortunately, a little buzzing distracted my duck, which got drawn towards this inch-long hymenopteran that was flitting by and sporadically landing on the sand. This resulted in my duck drawing unwanted attention from the weekend crowd due to a need for ground-level positioning and the wanton raising of my backside by a busy intersection.
My wasp consultant suggests this is a potter wasp in the genus Delta (possibly the widely-distributed Delta campaniforme). It seems this is the rarer of the two local Delta species (the other species is slightly larger and brown in colour). The wasp is solitary, the female constructing a potty-shaped nest of mud in which she lays her eggs and deposits juicy paralysed caterpillars for her offsprings' feasting. Speaking of which, it's time for me to go to the potty as well...
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