Cicada Killer wasp

My granddaughter Stasia is here this week, so the family converged at the lake to celebrate her arrival, swim, and enjoy a cookout. While the crew was running around in the sand, my grandson Lucas, who's become a wee bit phobic about bugs, yelled to alert me about the presence of something large, terrifying, and, no doubt, predatory on humans. I raced over to see what had struck fear in his young heart, and when I discovered the perpetrator, I knew why he was so scared. Sphecius speciosus, the Eastern Cicada Killer, is a two-inch-long, heavy-bodied wasp that can unnerve even a seasoned naturalist. But though the critter looks like something out of a Stephen King novel, it is, in truth, very nearly harmless... well, to our species. It hunts annual cicadas, which have just started to sing. The wasp stings and zombifies the prey insect, which it somehow manages to fly and drag back to a tunnel system that each female S. speciosus digs in sand and loose soil. The predator then lays an egg in the prey, covers up all evidence of the excavation, and leaves the incipient youngster to hatch and eat the cicada alive. This one has just completed her work. She had no interest in the photographer... or his grandson.