Unverified

These photos are of various individual potter wasps in a mob of about 20 plus which hovered around a jasmine vine in the 8:30 sun, late January. It was the first I’d seen of any potter wasps seeming to congregate in numbers, and there were no nests in the nearby vicinity to explain their presence. Attempts to record multiples of them in one shot proved futile, the quality of these photos is marginal, and that’s just focusing on individuals, as distinct from a cluster of them moving in one frame! Varying widths of black and yellow bands encircle the whole body, thinner yellows and broader black bands demarcating head & thorax, to a broader yellow band at the rear of thorax, and a broader black band to the front of the abdomen, then followed by ever decreasing width black bands on a basically yellow abdomen. All the wasps I was able to see had were consistent in this progression of markings so I feel confidant they were all of the same species. The legs were black closest to the body and yellow for most of their length. There may have been some more black but this was unclear, and I did not see their feet. Again they were flying most of the time, only landing occasionally and briefly. There was no obvious interaction between them, beyond a tolerance of the presence of others, landing and taking off. There’s a remote possibity these are the same species as the wasp logged at sighting 4635672, the Common Mud Dauber (Sceliphron laetum) but I’m doubtful, for example, the latter seems to have more yellow on the front of the head than these wasps.