Wasps are amazing!

 

Last year I saw that I had wasps going in and out of a brick air vent in the front of my house. I always leave wasps nests alone if they are not bothering anyone, and apart from avoiding the use of a short cut through path, this nest was not an issue.

I have now removed the unused, old nest as it was obviously blocking up the air vent. As you can see from the photo, it is a good size and rather elongated instead of round, as it had to be built to fit along the channel within the house.

Wasp's nest with tennis ball for size comparison

The inside of the wasp's nest

I recovered a couple of dead wasps from the nest and identified them as Vespula vulgaris, the common wasp.

The queens which were born last year, are the only survivors from the nest and having mated, will now be hibernating over-winter somewhere away from the nest.

When the queen emerges from hibernation in the early spring. She establishes her nest usually in a cavity in the ground or a tree, and as she builds each cell, she lays an egg in it.

After about 30 days, her first offspring, which will be workers, emerge as adults. These will all be female wasps and they will take over the foraging, nest building and maintenance duties, while also tending to new broods. Meanwhile, this extra help allows the queen to concentrate on laying egg after egg.

I watched many of these workers chomping away on my wooden fence throughout the summer, taking away small amounts of wood which they then chew into a paste-like pulp mixed with their saliva. They then form this pulp into the outer wall and also into hexagon-shaped paper cells within. The whole nest resembles a structure made from delicate sort of paper-mache.

From these new broods will hatch carnivorous larvae, which the adult wasps will bring food to in the form of aphids and other insects. In return, the larvae excrete a sugary liquid for the workers to eat.

The single queen who resided in my nest could have produced up to 10,000 workers, who in turn potentially may have gathered up to 250,000 aphids or equivalent!

Wasps are also pollinators of flowers and crops. Adult wasps don’t need much protein (the bugs they prey on are for the developing brood in the nest) but they do need sugar, which they get in the form of nectar from flowers. In the process of finding it, wasps pick up and transfer pollen from flower to flower. Unlike many bees, wasps do not mind what flowers they visit – as generalist pollinators they are often more abundant than bees in degraded or fragmented habitats and so are important ‘back-up’ pollinators in these areas.

Once the colony is big enough, the queen will switch to laying a sexual brood - these are males and the sexual females capable of becoming next year’s queens. When the sexual brood emerges, they leave the nest to mate and then the queens will find somewhere to hibernate over the winter.

So, should you find a wasps nest somewhere that is not going to cause you any immediate problems, then leave them be, as they are both fascinating and useful creatures!