Help needed...can you ID this flying menace?

hole e shite

Shoot dat

They live at the outside area of my mom's store. Little frickers

Haven't seen any of those in a few years. Haven seen many cicadas either come to think of it.

Just read the link. I definitely made the Jap hornet deal up.

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Haven't seen any of those in a few years. Haven seen many cicadas either come to think of it.

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Now that you mention it.. this is the first year I've seen Cicada's down here in a while, and the first time I saw one of these giant wasps in our back yard..

coincidence? I think not.

Yeah, we call em "cicada killers" up here, too. As far as I can tell, they don't live in a colony. I had one trying to build a nest in one of my bluebird boxes once. He ran the bluebird off and took over until I zapped him with a shot of carb/choke cleaner. Don't quite agree that they aren't aggressive to humans, though. Wife had an old gourd on the front porch with a small hole in it. I kicked that gourd out of my way one day and this "cicada killer" flew out of the hole and took after me. Thank goodness I was wearin my old wasp swattin, yellow jacket smashin, and cicada killer ball cap. That thing had a stinger at least 3/8" long and you could see a little drop of poison on the end of the stinger. You better believe I'm scared of em!

Thanks everyone for the responses. I too thought they were called Cicada killers, but not sure. I agree they don't seem to run in packs, the ones I saw flying around each other were constantly fighting but they look mean. They were catching dragonflys in the sky and destroying them....pretty awesome to see. I have two 4 pound yorkies that got after that one and I was pretty sure it would have tore their little asses up.

One year I had a lot more of these things than usual flying around. And, oddly enough, they were attracted to the lights after dark. They'd fly into the windows and if you turned on a porch light, here they'd come. Don't know if maybe they were huntin the bugs that come to a light? I took an 80 watt bug zapper and cut away the small plastic panels which prevented these oversized monsters from getting to the electrical grid. In one night alone, I must have killed 50 or 60 of em. After a couple of nights of this, I had the population down enough that I could turn on the porch light, open the garage door with the light on, etc. without having to dodge giant, mutated, kamikaze cicada killers. Tree huggers wouldn't like this, but I bet a tree hugger has never been stung by one of these things.

I actually saw one of these things take a cicada out mid-flight right outside of CEBA. From what I remember, they're not a danger to us.