European Paper Wasp
You know that Spanish phrase, “Mi casa es su casa”? Well, I never said that to Polistes dominulus, but here she is taking me up on that offer, chewing up my deck to expand her nest. In this picture, you are looking straight down the back of my deck at my lawn. I nailed up a tiny strip of 1/8″ plywood a few years ago to support, of all things, a wasp trap.
Oh, the irony.
A couple of cool things to notice about this pic (you may need the larger version to see these):
- The spiky cleats inside her knees. Yikes!
- She’s torn up most of a spitball from the deck already. The gray mass just visible behind her front leg is shredded wood (paper, hence the name!) that she’ll use to build up her nest.
I don’t know if this is a queen or a worker. What I do know is that there is evidence of my bug-fascinated insanity dating back to 2005, with this post by my wife: My husband is NUTS. The wasp trap mentioned in that post is the very same one I had clipped to that piece of plywood.
In the comments to that article, I posted a photograph of me handling the trap. I’ve copied it over here to insectpod for your viewing pleasure. (The maniac is the one on the right.) This photo was taken after I had captured about half the wasps I would get that day; I ended up with 32-33 wasps, at 5 of which were queens, based on the way they would clump up at night.
tceisele said,
May 12, 2008 @ 8:39 am
Ooo, nice picture of the papermaking process! Incidentally, unless it has been a *lot* warmer where you are than it is here up by Lake Superior, there hasn’t been enough time for a queen to have raised up some new worker brood yet. If they are like honeybees, it takes at least 21 warmish days to go from an egg to a new-emerged wasp, and so far we’ve had about 10 days. I should really keep an eye on the wasp nests being built in my father-in-law’s hunting blind, and time them from egg to emergence to get a better estimate.
Around here, any wasp or bumblebee that we are seeing flying around before about June is pretty certain to be an overwintered queen looking to start a new nest.
JFargo said,
May 12, 2008 @ 10:07 am
I hate those things.
Not afraid of them, and not disgusted by them or anything. I don’t smoosh them when I see them, and usually just move them out of my house via the cup-and-paper method, but I hate them.
Could be because I was once stung by two at the same time, almost exactly opposite one another on either side of my neck as a child.
That was the summer I earned the nickname “Frankenstein.”
JFargo said,
May 12, 2008 @ 10:08 am
Though now, thinking about it, I realize the kids were probably thinking of Herman Munster.
Alan said,
May 12, 2008 @ 10:42 am
Nice picture! Are these the same bugs that seem to love human foods as well, and plague picnics in the summer-time? Or are those yellow-jackets?
David Brady said,
May 12, 2008 @ 9:46 pm
Alan: EPW’s will forage a bit, but yellowjackets are much more known for that behavior. (Yellowjackets are technically hornets, which are wildly different critters that paper wasps.)
tceisele: The wasps out here have been flying for about 4 weeks, so it’s possible that we’ve got some drones out now. This could well be a queen, but I really don’t know.