For those who don’t know, mud daubers are ferocious looking insects from the wasp family. As we all know, you leave wasps alone, because they are evil and angry and will try to kill you. However mud daubers are surprisingly docile members of this family with a single-minded goal of collecting as much mud as possible while simply navigating around larger creatures the way we would walk around lamp posts. Mud daubers don’t care about anything but the mud. They were literally coming to our backyard from locations somewhere well above the 50′ trees behind our property, as they’d fly straight up and over every time they were done. As we were pouring rocks they’d simply keep moving around the trench to get to another area not yet covered. When using a plate tamper, water can be forced to the surface of the rocks, bringing with it all the fines (dust) from the gravel, which is a kind of mud. The daubers even showed up to collect this, despite this extremely heavy and loud machine (+100db) shaking the ground right next to them. Mud daubers do not care. They only want the mud.

This was originally going to be the comic about them collecting mud and looking up to say “THAT MACHINE IS VERY LOUD, ZIR!” as they’d simply dart out of the way at the last second and come back seconds after the tamper moved away.

Mud daubers know they’re faster than you and just move rather than getting angry. They’ve too much mud to collect to get angry.