Wasps & Hornets
Wasps and hornets are skilled predators that keep caterpillar numbers down, though a badly placed nest can be a real problem. These guides cover species identification, nest types, sting facts, and removal decisions.
Fierce-looking, mostly useful. A paper wasp colony is free pest control; a yellowjacket nest by the door is a problem. Know which you have.
Size
10 to 45 mm
hornets the giants
Diet
Sugars and prey
larvae fed chewed insects
Nest
Chewed wood pulp
paper combs, eaves, ground
Sting
Females, reusable
smooth, not barbed
Species
Tens of thousands
a handful bother people
A colony through the year
Wasps don't overwinter as a nest. Each colony lives a single year, and that is the key to knowing whether a nest is even worth removing.
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Spring: lone queen A single overwintered queen builds the first paper cells and raises the first workers herself.
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Summer: colony grows Workers take over. The nest swells to hundreds, all hunting caterpillars and grubs to feed the young.
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Early fall: peak The colony peaks and the workers switch to sugar. This is the yellowjacket at your soda can.
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Frost: the nest dies Cold kills the whole colony. Only new queens survive to overwinter, and the nest is never reused.
I keep a standing defense of wasps and I mean it. Watch a paper wasp colony for an afternoon and you'll see caterpillar after caterpillar carried off your vegetables. The autumn yellowjacket at your soda can is the family's whole reputation problem, and it's a few species out of thousands.
Sam Fielding · field note · about Sam
Typical season
Colonies build through summer; yellowjackets peak, and get bold, in early fall.
Often confused with
Bees
Fuzzy rather than shiny, thicker-waisted, and only interested in flowers
Hoverflies
Wears the same stripes but has two wings and no sting at all
Paper wasps invented paper long before we did, chewing wood fiber into pulp for their open honeycomb nests.
Paper Wasps
The long-legged ones under the eaves. Open umbrella combs, small colonies, and surprisingly reluctant to sting away from the nest.
A single overwintered yellowjacket queen can raise a colony of several thousand workers by the end of summer.
Yellowjackets
The picnic crashers. Ground and cavity nesters, brilliant pest controllers all summer, then sugar-hungry and short-tempered in fall.
Start here
Hornets are simply the largest wasps, and despite the reputation they're calmer around people than yellowjackets.
Hornets
The heavyweights. Big, loud, and less aggressive than their size suggests; they hunt flies and caterpillars in serious numbers.