wasp nest

What Are Wasp Nests Made Of

Wasps are an advanced and complex species that has been hunting bees for millennia. They are a hive species that function in unison through the use of a number of hormones to lead, attract and dissuade other wasps. Wasps are intelligent, more so than bees and most other insects. They have a frightening ability to recognize the faces of other species, like humans. If you harm or aggravate a wasp they will remember you and if they see you again will call on the swarm to chase you, around corners, over and under obstacles, avoiding other humans in their race to sting you. They will even wait in a swarm over water for you to come up for air. They are one of the most dangerous insects in North America and can actually kill a human being with a swarm of stings. Unlike female bees the female worker wasps can sting indefinitely or until their stinger is ripped out. Unlike bees, the wasp does not die from this and some species can regrow a lost stinger.

The nest that wasps create is extremely advanced. It takes many months to build a full nest and they build it from wood they chew off of dead limbs or decks and other deadwood. They will mix it with saliva and then apply it to the slowly growing nest. In the spring a new and pregnant queen will inspect areas for safety and find a place to build a small nest to lay her first worker eggs. She will be the sole carer for them until they mature into adult worker wasps. At that point, the queen will stop working and focus exclusively on laying eggs. The workers are all sterile females. Sterile females can sting and are highly aggressive. When the fall arrives the wasp queen will produce a number of new queens and a number of new sexually active males. They will do a dance where after the males die and the females leave to hibernate through the winter. The old nest, including the workers and the old queen, will die off but that is not the end. Queens-born in a nest often returns to reinvigorate an old nest they lived in before or one they find. This is why it is important to remove nests after they have been exterminated or have died from winter. This will prevent a reinfestation but not a new nest in a different location.

Wasp nests die in the winter but this does not have to occur. The nest can be built inside of the walls of a building, often through a hole in the mortar and then remain in the warmth of the wall through the winter. This will allow queens to live longer, possibly multiple years and allows workers to continue multiplying without any fear of the fall. These nests can if allowed to grow, turn into massive super nests that can fill entire wall segments and even fill the walls of large parts of the house. This situation can be dangerous during treatment. It’s very important not to seal the opening because that can result in wasps drilling through your drywall and entering the house for food and oxygen. This will make the situation so severe you will likely have to vacate your home and have a full interior treatment done on your home, which is not cheap. Sealing the hole even after the treatment can be dangerous.

One of the worst parts about wasps is in the early summer and spring they don’t bother anyone. They are hunting insects to feed to the new workers when they are still eggs. The worker will hatch, eat the headless insect and then grow into an adult wasp through instar transformations. The wasps do this for months but nearing the end of the summer their work suddenly stops and the wasps have nothing to do. They will spend their time from this point onwards competing with humans for sweet foods and drinks like deserts and alcohol. This will ruin your summer and then you will have to deal with a wasp nest you never knew was there.

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