Garden Pests and Diseases: paper wasps, 1 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
One more picture, because I couldn't resist. (Sorry) She's hard at work here, even if she did take over a butterfly box of my neighbor's (we share a small fish pond where the box hangs). The house stealing isn't much of a problem anyway; due to drought, we have very few butterflies here this year, and no Fritilaries at all.

I'm pretty sure that this one is a Polistes metricus, because her abdomen has the bumpy spot underneath that is described on bug guide for this species, bt she's a lot darker than my red wasp above.

After I took this picture, she fit herself into one of the slits (not this one, because she didn't like having her picture taken) and managed to fit her food for her babies in too.