Hello Everyone,
As the season comes to a close, there isn’t much I’m doing that’s interesting enough to talk about really. I’m mostly feeding the colonies, so they have enough food for winter and treating for varroa mites. So I’m going to use this post to talk about another “eusocial insect” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality) that we notice a lot more at this time of year, especially in the nice weather with all the barbeques and alfresco dining.
The Wasp
Dun dun duuuuuuun!
Yes, the dreaded wasp. The bee’s angrier, more annoying cousin that will ‘butt-dagger’ anything and anyone who moves even a millimetre when they buzz by. Forged in the fires of mount doom with all of the volcano’s blistering fury tentatively confined in a chitinous insect body. Were they big enough to use door handles, we would all be enslaved by these maniacal creatures. The only reason they let us live is due to their need to watch our sad faces as they chomp down on all of our picnic stuffs. All wasps must be destroyed on sight lest they finally decide to finish us off in a buzzing doom.
That, of course, is all absolute nonsense but I enjoyed writing it. Wasps are incredibly useful and for the most part just like bees in temperament. “So, if that’s the case, why did I just get stung several times for waving one away yesterday?!” I hear you cry.
Well, to explain why they’re so grumpy at this time of year I need to talk about a wasp’s lifecycle from the beginning and how they work. Unlike honeybees, who spend winter all huddled together nice and snug to keep warm in their hive, wasp queens will spend winter on their own - hibernating somewhere sheltered and warm-ish like a loft space or hollow tree stump. I even found one hibernating under one of my hives last year.
A wasp’s lifecycle
In spring, the queen slowly emerges from her hiding space when it’s warm enough and flies off to find a good place to build a nest. Generally, a wasp isn’t too fussy about deciding on home locations, it just needs to be somewhere dry, safe and structurally sound enough to support the weight of thousands of insects in, what is essentially, a big paper bag. They mostly choose hollow structures like logs but are not against making nests in wall cavities and loft spaces (which I’ve been getting contacted about a lot recently).
After finding a suitable site, the queen flies off to collect wood fibre by using her powerful jaws to scrape and chew up trees, fences and even cardboard. You may notice little lines, like scratches, on your fence panels well these are generally caused by wasps collecting the building materials for a hive. The queen then flies back and mixes the fibre with her saliva to create a paper mâché pulp and starts construction.
Generally, the queen will make what looks like a small umbrella of pockets/chambers (like honeycomb) about the size of a golf ball and then lay eggs in each one. It doesn’t take long for the eggs to hatch, at which point the queen stops focusing solely on building and starts dividing her time between it and feeding the larvae until they pupate (become ready to change into adults). These new adult wasps, once emerged, become the queen’s workforce taking over all of her jobs apart from egg laying. The colony pretty much explodes at this point as the queen turns into an egg laying machine and each new wasp that hatches increases the efficiency of the workforce. It can take as little as a month for a colony to go from just 30 wasps to over a thousand! By the end of spring, the golf ball nest is about the size of a football (soccer ball for the US readers) and the queen is doing nothing but laying around 200-300 eggs a day. There are about 5000 worker wasps in the colony at this point and that number only grows as summer comes into bloom.
Mid to late summer the colony peaks at around 10,000 wasps! The nest generally takes the shape of the cavity it’s in as the workers just don’t know when to quit. It is at this point that the queen produces eggs that will become future queens and fertile males. In autumn, they emerge as adults and fly off to mate with the queens and males of other colonies. The new fertilised queens fatten themselves up and find somewhere safe to hibernate until the following spring. It is in autumn too that the original queen dies off leaving the colony with no figurehead and no way to maintain its numbers. This is the reason that we have problems with wasps in late August to the end of September.
The leaderless throngs venture forth into the world to destroy all in their path, only the forbidden flame of the gods from Mount Celestia can save us and purge them from the earth!.. Sorry, I was overexaggerating again…
Throughout the year worker wasps are busy catching smaller insects (like aphids) to feed to their larvae, collecting nectar for the adults to eat and building their nest. They are so busy and single-minded that you can almost handle them like honeybees. Once the queen dies and there is no way for the colony to expand, the workers are left jobless with only one single purpose remaining: food. Unlike their larvae, which eat mostly protein from chewed up small insects, adult wasps wholly subsist on simple carbohydrates in the form of sugar. The adults at this time of year with no more commitments to the hive fly off to find anything sugary to gorge themselves on. They’re like us when we feel we have no purpose… they eat a lot to make themselves feel better and are quite bitter towards others.
By the end of autumn, all wasps (barring the new hibernating queens) have died off, leaving an empty nest which can be removed without any danger if necessary. If you have a wasp nest in an unreachable place don’t worry, old nests are not re-colonised the following year…. although a new nest MAY be established next to an existing one if there is space.
So, what does this mean for beekeepers?
Unfortunately for us beekeepers, wasps at this time of year can wipe out small colonies that can’t defend themselves against a full onslaught. Honey to an adult wasp is like an extremely addictive drug, causing them to fly into a frenzy for a single drop. It only takes one wasp to make its way into and out of a hive unimpeded before hundreds of them descend on the entrance. Wasps can be absolutely brutal when they attack a beehive. Their jaws are specially designed for killing insects, where a honeybee’s mandibles are mainly designed for grasping things like a hand. The wasps charge in en-masse biting the heads off any bee that they come into contact with. Their main focus is finding the queen which they target with ferocity. Once she is gone, they finish off any other bee that gets in their way chomping and stinging in a frenzy. Once almost all of the bees are dead, the wasps are free to plunder to their heart’s content. A hive can be stripped of all resources in a matter of hours and the aftermath is absolutely heart-breaking for a beekeeper to find.
“So, what do I do if wasps are pestering me?”
It depends on the time of year really. In spring and summer, you should just leave them alone if you can and they should buzz off eventually. Wasps are incredibly important for the ecosystem. They are called the “gardeners friend” for a reason; the voracious appetite of their young means that we can enjoy fresh veg and fruit as if it weren’t for them killing our pests most of our crops would be ruined. We’d also be bitten to death by midges and mosquitoes.
In autumn you can set traps up if they’re really being a nightmare or you need to protect your beehives and it will help them shuffle off their mortal coil a little quicker. Personally, I’d just leave them to it or put out a plate of sugary cola about 5m away from where you’re wanting to eat, they should go to that instead of your table.
So, there you have it, a post about a misunderstood buzzer that is a godsend throughout the year until it gets cold and they get mean. (Like me ~ Kat, ed)
I hope you’re all safe and well,
Greg