A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2005 Mystery Insect Challenge

Those of you that know me know my camera STINKS for closeups. So, as much as I chased this flying critter around the house for a photo shoot, I couldn't get a clear picture. I'll try to describe as best as I can. It's driving me nuts, not knowing what it is!

The head looks like an ant's head - kind of a sideways oblong/oval (positioned on the horizontal). The body looks to have 2 round circles - almost clear like lantern windows (it's pretty cool actually) and the wings (2 of them) are translucent, but have some kind of wavy pattern - kind of like a paintbrush stroked on a very light wavy line in a reeeeally light gray color.

Of course now I cant even find the horrible pictures I took! Anyone wanna take a stab at this one? In the meantime, I'll see if I can't locate those bad pictures -- guess they were better than nothing.

Thanks for any guesses!

2 questions:

1/. Were you awake at the time of the alledged visitation?
2/. Have you seen recently seen the movie "predator" ?

some guesses...

flying ant & termite

again

Longy, go stick your head in the compost heap will ya? I'm being fair dinkum, dead set, yaknow, havin a lend of ya. Dinky di, all the way. Or something along those lines...

Rugby, that was my first guess -- I'm super paranoid about stuff eatin my house, but thankfully I can cross both of those off the list of possible matches. It almost looks like a dirt dauber, but not.

Well I'll be. Looks like it IS a dirt dauber - just kind of different than what I'm used to seeing, I guess...but doing a google image search for 'dirt dauber' brought this picture up, which is what it looks like:
pic

Are there different kinds?

Perhaps you need one of these spiders in the house as well! We call these wasps Mud Wasps in the UK.

Where I grew up, we called them mud daubers. You would see them land in mud to collect. It would then dry into dirt hives.

mud dauber

Whoa - that's awesome! I mean, in a freaky kinda way

I had a couple in the house for a few days -- probably came in when the door or window was open...haven't seen em today, so I'll pass on the spider Though, who knows, we might have one - we have a good deal of spiders roaming around in here...but they don't 'bug' me