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Cicada Killer Wasps

Making It Grow! Minute logo

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow.  Recently, a Sumter County Master   noticed silver dollar-sized holes in her yard with soil piled up at one end and wondered if it was a mole or vole burrow, but there weren’t any of the usual above  ground runs you’d expect to find. At the same time, she found a dead wasp on her porch and brought that to the office. Bingo! She had already solved the puzzle herself. The Cicada Killer Wasp a native species stings and paralyzes   those huge adult cicadas after they emerge from the pupal cases we found on tree trunks and carries them back to an underground nursery she constructs in soil, the burrows. She fills different chambers within that structure with the paralyzed insects upon which she lays her eggs, they hatch and the larva take nourishment from those still living creature. 

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Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.