Stripping the beds today

and full of the joy of being in possession of a new washing machine, I did the job really thoroughly and took the under-underslips off the pillows. Shaking out the last one produced a fat queen wasp, she bounced off the bed and crawled sleepily across the floor

Hornet Fans Forever

3rd October
Whenever I mention hornets to a French person I get told that,
Three stings from a hornet could kill a man

The Director snorts with derision at this, apparently hornets are just large but non-aggressive wasps. He is a big hornet fan, last month he spent days filming a hornet going backwards and forwards from a pear hanging on it’s tree. The pear rotted and fell off the branch while it was being eaten, I had to sew it back on the branch so we could continue filming the whole pear disappearing.

I have great faith in The Director but, faced with the three-sting line from every single resident I’ve met, I’ve not been pushing to find a nest. Wednesday afternoon, with my invincible hair, I bit the bullet and headed to the bar to scout out farmers. I found a stocky man whose own head of dark hair stands up vertically and starts from an unusually low hairline, he is known by the local girls as Hérisson. When I said we needed a hornet’s nest he told me about a felled oak in one of his fields,
it's full of hornets, you can come and film that if you want.

Yesterday morning M.Hérisson took us to his field with the oak.
I’ve just thrown a rock at them to see if they're still there

We wanted to film the nest entrance and the way hornets organise security - they’re like night club bouncers, checking out everyone who wants to come in. The rock stuck in the entrance did make getting a good camera angle a bit tricky but we persevered. After a day with the hornets I’ve come to really like them and their wobbly flying.

That is the last of the insect footage that we expect to get until the spring. Insects tend to hibernate or die off for the winter so the next couple of weeks will be concentrating on getting establishing shots of landscape and habitats. Then the production goes back to the UK to edit the footage we have(100 hours so far) and write the scripts.

Digging Stops

Finally yesterday, after two and a half days of digging, the main chamber of the wasp’s nest is located. The Camera Boys wield a teaspoon taped to the end of a bamboo stick, gently scraping away at the wall of the chamber to make a hole big enough to insert an endoscopic lens. The camera is set up by the nest on a mechanism that controls it remotely. People are getting stung now and one of the Camera Boys has a hand swollen up like one of those foam things people wave at football matches.

By the end of the day we'd started getting some pictures - and it is fantastic, the wasps construct thick paper shelves of cells where they lay their eggs, there are layers and layers of this densely populated shelving. The wasps arriving all the time with food for wriggling larvae.

More Bloody Wasps

23rd September
A few months ago I allowed myself to be nominated the Health and Safety Officer for this insect filming project. The Big Controller wanted risk assessment forms completed and for someone to be responsible, I’m the one with the most recent First Aid certificate so I got the job. I’ve never felt responsible for anyone before and I’m not really sure how to do it. I’m still the laughing stock of the village for turning up at the Maire’s office in June wanting to know what usually killed people round here.

Now that we’re back to the full household complement of The Director, two Camera Boys and me, work has to start on items on the filming agenda that I’ve been trying to steer away from;

We need to film inside wasp’s and hornet’s nests, will you find us some Lulu ?
Let's have a party
Hey look there’s a wasp’s nest right here by the house.

The digging started yesterday and is being done very quietly so the wasps don’t guess what we’re up to, a bit like The Great Escape, but in reverse. It’s important not to actually break into any tunnel or the chamber, so work is proceeding very slowly. The aim is to find the main nest chamber and put in a tiny lens to film waspy activity. The nest entrance is a hole in the ground where (if you put your head really close to it and peer in) you can glimpse a tunnel veering to the left, The Director made a guess as to the likely location of the chamber (a bit further on in that direction), but the clever wasps have found a hole with a circular tunnel (the nest is made in an old animal burrow) and there is now a sort of moat virtually encircling the site.

There can’t be many wasps actually in the nest because they are all in the house with me and what's left of a big box of oozingly ripe figs that somebody generously contributed to Sunday’s party. Obviously I can’t join in the digging as I need to turn this potentially lethal health hazard into tarts.

Wasp Fluffing

6th September
Below the Lovely House there is a sunny, overgrown path sloping down to the lake, densely inhabited with Wasp Spiders (Argiope).
The Camera Boys have been hunkered down on this alley (not today, it’s pouring comme vache qui pisse) trying to film Mrs Wasp Spider catching and wrapping up some prey. This has been going on for days. There is a wasp’s nest close to the house and rubber-gloved boys swoop around with large butterfly nets trying to catch wasps which are then loaded into catapults and propelled into the spider’s web. Surprisingly difficult to film this one, many wasps end up getting overshot or fly away before they hit the web.
Crickets and grasshoppers are good though. These animals are completely random with their jumping, they just take off and hope for the best, often landing in a bad place like a spider’s web. Sometimes one of them will just catch the web with the coarse bit of a leg, he'll dangle there, trying to keep as still as possible, looking a bit worried, while he works out how to jump clear before the spider notices him - and sometimes he succeeds - and leaps straight into another web.

Note 1: In the spider's world the girls are usually much bigger than the boys, sometimes to same sort of ratio as a London bus and it's conductor. We film the bigger thing because it's easier - plus the girls are usually much better at hunting.

Note 2: The correct term for a person who handles and tries to control animals on set is a 'wrangler’ but we prefer fluffer. The fluffing job can involve brushing the insects off if they're looking a bit dusty and clearing the set of extraneous debris such as unnecessary foliage or other beasts who might have wandered on set.

Village of the Parasitic Wasps

27th August
Our current big filming location is Wasp Village, a prairie-like area along the banks of a big lake not far from the Lovely House. A complex network of wasps and other bugs live here and do thrilling things.




The Sand Wasp (ammophila) for example; She drags a juicy caterpillar that she's paralysed, to a site she likes the look of, then digs away at the sandy earth like a demented terrier. Hole dug, she grasps her prey, gives it another sting to keep it quiet, hauls it down the hole and lays an egg on it. She then goes to a lot of effort to close up the hole, finding a stone to fit the hole entrance and kicking the excavated sand around it. Then she presses her head against the stone and uses her body as a pneumatic drill, vibrating herself to settle the sand in firm around the stone. Finally she kicks a bit more sand around the site to make it invisible and prevent penetration by her competitors.

Bee City revisited

We've also been filming down at Bee City, a community of solitary bees with some wasps and other creatures that live in the sandy area by the car park at the Salle des Fetes. They survived all the cars driving over them during the village fete last month and are thriving. There about 3 or 4 different species of bee here including the Leaf Cutter Bee who steals other bees homes. Around the bees live a host of other tiny insects that you can only really see by watching the rushes after macro filming.

The Ruby Tailed Wasp is particularly wonderful - in her sparkly red and green outfit she looks like an escapee from a glam-rock band. This tiny wasp watches for a particular wasp (cerceris) to go into a hole with a paralysed Leaf Cutter Bee, the larger wasp lays her egg on the bee and flies off. Ruby Tail nips in quick, before the wasp comes back to seal the hole, and lays her own egg on top, Ruby's larva hatches first, eats the other egg and lives on in the (still live) bee that was caught by the first wasp. A parasite’s parasite if ever there was one.