 Song Jodic, it looks like you have the next villain of the Godzilla movie series over here on our sitting studio here. Very close, very close careful. These are the infamous, sacred killer wasps. start flying when the cicadas emerge. They're the largest ones that we have in Nebraska. The females can grow up to two inches long, and the males are a little bit smaller though. A little bit smaller. You do have to be pretty large if you're going to catch one of these cicadas that we see flying around. Our annual dog's day cicadas are pretty large, so I can see why they're quite big. Is that one of the reasons that they're so large? Right, right. So she's got to fly out and hunt and catch them. They catch a cicada, and they paralyze it with their venom. She dragged it back to the burrow until lay an egg on it, and the larvae will emerge, eating and concealing that cicada as food, pupating over the winter, and emerging the next fall. Circle the lives. I'm always really impressed with the digging abilities of these wasps. When we look around here at the school that we're visiting today, we see all these nests. They can be up to two feet deep down into the soil, and they can run as long as 36 inches underneath the ground. So not only does the female do the hunting and gathering, but she moves the earth to make these burrows. So those mounds that you see, she digs that out from the underground, and those u-shaped entrance that are characteristic of their nests. She does that with her hind legs that have two spurs on them, by the way. So we've got males and females flying around. The male doesn't really do a whole lot though, right? He's sort of all bark and no bite. He has a pseudo-stinger on the tip of his abdomen. He flies around and pretends to guard the nest with that water gun, essentially, but it's not really hooked up to any venom. So you don't really have to worry about him. Is that right? The males are fakers. They're aggressive though, and they'll fly right up in your face. They're territorial, so they're defending their territory from other males, so they'll try to attack them, and it looks like they're attacking humans, but they really have nothing behind that stinger. The female, on the other hand, does have venom behind that large stinger, and she uses that though for prey, not for people. So they don't normally sting, only when they're defending themselves, as in being handled, squished, or stepped on with bare feet. They're not like other ground nesting social wasps. So where do people find these wasps out in their landscape? So they're located normally in wild-drained soils, loose soils, and in full sunlight. They can be located at homes around flower beds, around patios, sidewalks. Sometimes in the middle of the turf, flower beds, things like that. So if they don't sting you, they don't cause a lot of damage. They're not harming grass, they're not harming structures. Do we have to control these insects? Not necessarily. A lot of times, they're just there being predators in nature. But sometimes in annual aggregation sites, when there are a lot of cicadas and a lot of nests, sometimes people want to control them. But it's really difficult. I would recommend they do that at night, and they treat each individual burrow with some sort of pyrethroid dust. But normally, there's no control necessary. How do they apply the dust? They can do that with a turkey baster, or they have bulb dusters available that you can buy. Don't spray over the whole turf area, because it won't soak in, right? Correct. You can also use your tennis racket to swing around and take care of some of the ones that are buzzing around. But if they're not really bothering you, they're not causing any damage, you can just enjoy this wonderful parasitoid part of the pageantry of nature.