Welcome to Wasp of the Week! In this series, I hope to perhaps change people’s perspective on the weird and wonderful variety of wasps we have here in the UK.

To start this series I will discuss the wasps that most people are familiar with, those of the social wasps, the black and yellow picnic bothering wasps and hopefully answer the question many people ask, which is “What is the point of wasps?” In the British Isles, we currently have eight species of social wasp and one species of cuckoo wasp in the subfamily Vespinae, and these are the wasps I will be talking about today. They can be inquisitive, defensive and downright nowty at certain times of the year but they are an extremely important part of the ecosystem and without wasps, our lives during the warmer months would be a lot less pleasant and we would no doubt need a lot more pesticides to enjoy growing food.

Let me explain. Social wasps follow an annual cycle in the British Isles, each spring the queens that mated the previous year emerge from their overwintering sites and begin to look for a suitable, safe place to start their nest. She does all of the foundation work alone, creating a small, golf ball-sized embryo nest where she will lay the female eggs that will become her first workers. It is a perilous time for our queen wasp. She needs to hunt for small insects to feed her carnivorous brood, keeping herself strong while creating her small, but perfect nest by rasping rotten or weathered wood, mixing with saliva to create the paper, while making sure her brood doesn’t chill and fail. She may abandon an early nest if it proves not to be as safe as she first thought, too much disturbance or she may be predated herself. A lot of work for one small insect!

Once her first workers have emerged she will then become nestbound, she now concentrates on laying eggs and the workers take over the hunting and building/expanding the nest.

Different species have different preferences for nest sites, but they can occur underground, in dense bushes or trees, or in any suitably sized cavity such as outhouses, sheds, roof spaces, and even bird boxes. Nests consist of several, downward-facing, round combs consisting of many hexagonal cells. The combs are surrounded by an envelope of the same paper her combs are made of.

There is a popular myth that if you hang up or leave an old nest in place they will not choose to nest again in the vicinity, this is untrue and does not work. Once the nest has ended and the workers cease to keep it repaired it will disintegrate very quickly if exposed to the elements or in the ground, although in places like lofts nests can be preserved for some time.

The wasp larvae are carnivorous, while the adult wasps are sweet feeders, visiting flowers and are pollinators. The workers will work tirelessly, hunting those small insects that make leisurely walks uncomfortable in the warmer months, or will munch through our crops and will quickly discard the bits that are not useful, carrying the ball of proteinous food back to feed the larvae.

Wasp larvae will rasp on the sides of the cells when hungry and in return for feeding will give the adult a sweet reward. This keeps worker wasps busy for the first portion of the nesting cycle. Towards the end of the nesting cycle, the colony will stop creating workers and will move on to the big finale, the queens that will carry on the genes next year and males to mate with queens of other colonies.

Once this stage is nearing completion the workers become redundant, no longer getting that sweet reward. Those larval secretions make up the majority of an adult wasps diet and begin to dry up as the queen and male brood grow and that’s when they come looking for our sweet food and drink. Upon release the new queens will build up body fats for the long, winter sleep, and after mating the new queens will find a suitable spot to spend the winter, where she will tuck up her valuable wings and antenna. That year’s workers and males will die off. After the winter, and come the spring sunshine the queens will emerge and the whole cycle begins again. Didn’t I tell you they are wonderful?

With special thanks to Ian Gillen and Dave Jones for supplying the images.