Cicada Killer

At up to 2" in length, it's big and it looks menacing but it's just a relatively harmless Cicada Killer Wasp. Males are smaller than females. Males don't have a stinger but females do. It's very rare that one would sting a person. They just aren't aggressive critters. These wasps emerge in the summer and they hunt for cicadas. They paralize cicadas by stinging them and they take the paralized cicadas to their burrows to feed the larvae.

They get trapped on my screened porch all the time. At first they kinda freaked me out but once I found out what they are, it's no big deal when we do a catch & release.