- Mary K. Hanson
- Posted On
Tuleyome Tales: Is that wasp a friend or a foe?
Unlike the irritable yellow jackets, you might actually want to keep those more docile paper wasps around (unless you’re allergic to them).
Both yellow jackets and many species of paper wasps are black and yellow, but the paper wasps also come in a rusty-red and yellow variation.
Paper wasps’ wings are narrower and have more of a black tinge to them than the yellow jackets, and side-by-side comparisons also show that the yellow jackets are stouter and thicker and rather look like “thugs” beside the more elongated and narrow-wasted paper wasps.
Another way to tell the species apart is by watching them in flight: Yellow jackets tend to hold their legs up when they’re flying while Paper Wasps let their long legs dangle down and trail behind them.
Bear in mind that the females of both species can sting you. (The stinger is actually an adapted ovipositor, so only the females sting.)
The yellow jacket is far touchier about intruders and far more aggressive than the paper wasp and often attack en masse.
That yellow-and-black insect invading your trash can or picnic is most likely a yellow jacket. They have a varied diet that consists of anything from fruit, to nectar and tree sap, to insects, to human food and garbage – and this sometimes gives way to their erroneous nickname: “meat-eating bees.”
Yellow jackets aren’t bees, of course, and unlike bees, they will go after human sources of food when there isn’t enough nectar or insects around them to feed to their larvae.
They’ll often try to take over picnic foods, garbage, and roadkill carcasses looking for sources of protein and sugar… and they will violently defend any food source they find. This can lead to lots of painful interactions between yellow jackets and humans. And unlike honey bees who lose their stingers after a single strike, yellow jackets can sting repeatedly.
Paper wasps, on the other hand, are far less belligerent, and usually only sting if their nest or they themselves are being physically mishandled. They also generally stick to insect prey, and have them with a side nectar.
These are the wasps that can actually be boon to your backyard – keeping the insect populations down as they feed their young. And they’re great pollinators, too.
Where and how these flying creature build their nests also varies. Both paper wasp and yellow jacket nests are made of “paper,” the chewed up pulp of plant material that is bound together with the insect’s own saliva and then laid out in specific forms.
Each nest construction is started by a single queen who does all of the work herself – building the foundation and the first egg chambers, laying the eggs, feeding and nurturing the larvae – until the first generation of offspring hatches and becomes her personal labor force, helping her enlarge the nest and her colony.
Yellow jackets tend to build massive structures (that can hold up to 5,000 workers and 15,000 chambers) and prefer to build underground, although they will also sometimes build the nests in buildings or trees, like hornets do, if the conditions are right.
The yellow jacket nest usually consists of multiple “hanging chandeliers” of egg repositories built layer upon layer, something like a wasp condo with many different floors. Then the whole thing is covered with a paper shell to conceal the floors and chandeliers inside of it.
Paper wasps, on the other hand, usually build their much smaller nests under overhangs or in tight corners (usually with only about 100 chambers in them). Each nest usually consists of only one “chandelier” (or “umbrella”) of egg repositories, and is open to the air (without the paper covering the Yellow Jackets use.)
For both yellow jackets and paper wasps, each nest, regardless of its size, is vacated in the winter when all but the queens die off.
Mated queens overwinter by hibernating (usually in the ground or some other “hibernaculum” like a crevice in a tree or building) and then emerge in the spring.
Regardless of how successful their previous nest was, the queens of both species will ignore their old nests and build brand new ones each year.
So, once the colony has died off and the queen has vacated the premises, the nests are safe to handle.
The next time you’re outside and see a yellow-and-black wasp flying around, take a closer look. Is it a yellow jacket or a paper wasp?
Mary K. Hanson is a Certified California Naturalist, author and nature photographer. She will be co-teaching a naturalist course for the public through Tuleyome in early 2018. Tuleyome is a501(c)(3) nonprofit conservation organization based in Woodland, Calif. For more information visit www.tuleyome.org.
