Genevieve Bilhbrey, age 10, of Three Rivers, California, for her question:
What kind of creature is a mud dauber?
Since the mud dauber is a creature, it must be some kind of animal. Perhaps its . favorite recreation is making those squishy, forbidden mud pies. Perhaps it enjoys slosh¬ing through soggy swamps. Perhaps it daubs slithery paints, just as we daubed pictures with finger paints when we were very young.
Some of our modern artists use rainbow colors to daub impossible pictures, but the mud dauber does not belong to this school of art. Nor does the creature make mud pies or splat¬ter wet dirt around just for fun. The mud dauber happens to be a waspy insect. She is a female with a mind of her own and to her, mud has a very serious purpose in life. By nature she is a master builder, and mud is her building material. She uses dibs and dabs of wet clay to build sturdy, secure shelters for her offspring.
The assorted wasps, of course, are hot tempered cousins of the sweet honeybee. The fierce yellow jackets are social wasps who live together in large family colonies. They build big, papery nests from chewed wood pulp. Many other waspy insects live solitary lives and the solitary mother must provide for her offspring all by herself with no help from her relatives. She provides food and shelter to see the youngsters through the egg, grub and cocoon stages of their lives. But this work keeps her too busy, to educate them.
Some solitary wasps are skillful carpenters, others are miners and others are talented stone masons. The mud dauber is a pottery making wasp. Certain American Indians shaped muddy dirt into bricks and let them dry in the sun. They used these adobe bricks to con¬struct buildings, and in desert regions these buildings of dried mud are very cozy and durable. The mud dauber was making her adobe buildings long before the human family arrived on earth.
The busy mother makes her building material in her mouth. It is clay mixed with her own saliva. She builds a nest of separate cells shaped somewhat like tiny tubes. She mixes a batch of muddy mortar and plasters the cells together, maybe under the roof of your porch. Then the busy mother hunts and stings spiders and more spiders. She carries their paralyzed bodies to the nest and stuffs a few into each cell. She adds an egg and seals the door. The young caterpillar that hatches from the egg has a cozy pantry full of its favorite food. Later, it stays inside the adobe but and sleeps through its pupa stage of life. At last, the solitary wasp hatches into ad adult and leaves its lonely cradle to fly outside and cope with the world.
A mud dauber never teaches or even sees her daughters. The teaching job is taken over by Mother Nature herself. Each wasp is born with a built in blueprint of instructions. carried by a complicated chemical called DNA. DNA is present in all living things and it assures that the traits of each species will be carried on in the next generation. Because of DNA, the little wasp caterpillar will become a mud dauber just like her mother and build a nest just like the one her mother built. She will find the right food for her young caterpillars. And a sample of her own DNA, with the same instructions, will be right in the eggs for the next generation of mud daubers to inherit.