I think I've determined that the wasps flying the pasture yesterday were Scoliid Wasps (Scolia dubia) which are are described as: You DEFINITELY want this wasp in your yard. The favorite food for the larvae is the Japanese Beetle Grub. The female somehow locates an underground grub, digs underneath it and lays an egg on it. The egg hatches and the grub is doomed! If you see these in your garden, you also have an infestation of Japanese beetles. They are also very timid - you can brush them off a plant and not get stung. so despite being scary they are mostly harmless, and may help to control the japanese beetles that have been eating everything.

alisande, you reminded me. My grandfather and brother have both been master electricians and done work in our Centennial Park Parthenon. We must stay put where we land.

Jasdip, your photo brought back childhood memories. Planter's Peanuts originated in my City. There was a PP store on our city square and a man in a Mr Peanut suit would walk around near the store and square giving out little PP trinkets to kids. Many years after Mr Peanut was a thing of the past and the store was gone, while we were fishing, my DH and I met the sweet guy who wore the costume. I felt like a kid meeting a childhood hero.

Aurora over Icelandic Fault Image Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado (TWAN, Earth and Stars) Explanation: Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. Exactly this week in 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event. A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME. What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged last week over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.