By September 2009 I had been living in Cyprus for twelve months, in a large house on the outskirts of the little village of Letymbou, north of Paphos. It stood in the middle of vineyards, surrounded by olive, apple, pear and fig trees. Apart from the birds, insects and my two English Springer Spaniels, Harvey and Holly, it was wonderfully peaceful.

One of the upstairs bedrooms became my office. It was there, in 2009, that my writing career really began to gather momentum. I was working on Operation Werwolf while also writing a weekly blog series called Living in Cyprus.

The room was simple. My desk faced a plain cupboard, the walls were bare. An open window looked over the driveway and garden. During those first few months in Cyprus I still hadn't acclimatised to the summer heat, so every window stayed open.

One September morning, with the temperature finally beginning to cool, I had just finished writing a paragraph. As I read it back, my vision suddenly blurred.

Not badly enough to make me panic, just enough to make me stop.

I took off my glasses and cleaned them.

No blurring. I blinked a few times. Perfectly normal again.

"That's odd," I thought, before carrying on.

Ten minutes later... my sight blurred, again.

This time I looked around the room to see if anything had caught my eye, and that's when I spotted it.

In the join between the ceiling and the wall was a small brown blob.

"Another damn tick," I muttered.

There had already been fair share of those around.

I fetched a brush, reached up and swept it away.

Only it wasn't a tick, it was mud. A tiny blob of brown mud stuck to the wall.

Strange, but hardly the mystery of the century.

It was lunchtime anyway, so I wandered downstairs and made myself a sandwich.

About ninety minutes later I returned to the office, sat down and read through the morning's work.

I was about to type the next sentence when... my vision blurred, again.

I looked up, and then I saw it. The mud was back. Not only back, but bigger.

Now my curiosity had replaced my irritation.

This time I didn't brush it away.

Instead, I sat quietly and continued working.

A few minutes later, blurred!

"What the hell?"

Almost instinctively I looked towards the growing lump of mud.

And there it was.

A very large, jet-black mud wasp was clinging to the wall, busily plastering another mouthful of wet mud onto its latest construction project.

I sat watching, fascinated.

When it finished, it flew out through the open window.

Seconds later my vision blurred again.

Only now I understood.

The wasp wasn't making my eyesight fail.

Every few minutes it was flying at remarkable speed between the garden and the wall, passing directly between my eyes and the computer monitor. It crossed my line of sight so quickly that all I registered was a brief blur before it disappeared.

The "mysterious" mud was simply its building site.

Of course, once I'd discovered that, I had another question.

What exactly was it building?

As it turns out, mud wasps don't build nests in the way most wasps do.

They build tombs.

The female hunts spiders, paralyses them with a perfectly aimed sting, then drags the still-living spider back to the mud chamber. She repeats the process until the chamber contains enough unfortunate arachnids to feed her offspring, lays a single egg, seals the tomb with more mud and flies away.

Weeks later the larva hatches, enjoys a rather unusual packed lunch and eventually chews its way out as a brand-new mud wasp.

Nature can be wonderfully ingenious... and slightly horrifying.

The funniest part of the whole episode is that my brain spent half the morning trying to convince me something was wrong with my eyesight, when in reality I was simply sitting in the flight path of one of Cyprus's hardest-working builders, and occasionally it's only working builders.

Sometimes the greatest mysteries don't require detectives.

Sometimes all they require is a little patience...

...and a wasp carrying a mouthful of mud.

Copyright © Tom Kane 2026