A quiz: The first society to make paper was:
A. Egypt.
B. China.
C. Vespidae.
Answer: C.
Vespidae is the family that includes paper making wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets. Social insects, they've been accomplished papermakers for tens of millions of years, and may have given humans the inspiration for making their own.
This summer, a colony of yellow jackets built a nest in one of my greenhouses. Now, in September, it's the size of a basketball. The paper is gray and shimmers in the light. The workers are a handsome yellow and black. Foragers zip in and out of the entrance hole in the bottom. Others hang around outside like bouncers at a bar.
I admire, but don't get too close: these babies have a well-deserved reputation for a take-no-prisoners homeland security policy.
A little research shows they are probably Dolichovespula arenaria, the aerial yellow jacket. And the nest is a pretty big one. Football size is more typical. It is probably home to 500 to 1,000 workers – a lot of ouch.
The vespidae clan includes some 5,000 species of solitary and social wasps worldwide. In North America, there are about 300 species. Vermont and New Hampshire are home to about 10 species of paper wasps and yellow jackets, including half a dozen species of yellow jacket (this includes the bald-faced hornet, a type of yellow jacket).
Vespid species can nest in the ground, in the walls or under the eaves of houses, or in trees. The stubbier yellow jackets are more aggressive than the longer, spindle-shaped paper wasps, generally. Yellow jackets are sensitive to vibration, which is why you're likely to tick them off if they're nesting under your deck, or you're using a string trimmer around their nest cavity in the ground. The stings are painful and can prompt a severe allergic reaction in some people.
In the colder parts of North America, the queens winter in cracks, crevices, and holes in the ground. They emerge in spring, create a small paper nest, and lay the first eggs. The paper pulp is created using tiny bits of wood fiber collected from dead trees, fence posts, and other plant material. They mix it with saliva and mold it into a thin sheet using their mandibles. Some species of wasps use mud rather than paper. The nest is enlarged as the colony grows. The adults catch and kill caterpillars and insects and feed the protein to their growing larvae. The adults prefer nectar, which is why you'll often find them sucking on squashed ripe fruit or trying to drink out of your soda can.
Entomologist Jon Turmel said people tend to notice yellow jackets and wasps more in late summer and fall because they're, literally, empty-nesters. The queen has stopped laying eggs, and the larvae have all grown and turned into adults. No longer occupied with bringing home the bacon in the form of caterpillars and bugs, the adults are simply foraging for sweet stuff and more likely to crash picnics and ballgames. “They're unemployed,” Turmel said. “Right now all they want is carbs.”
While some insist that this summer’s dry weather has led to an increase in “ground bees,” Turmel, who retired as Vermont's state entomologist in June, said he doesn't think this has been a particularly bad – which is to say “abundant”– year for wasps and 'jackets Chris Rallis, an entomologist with the New Hampshire Department of Agriculture, agreed, though his coworker, who visits mountaintop air monitoring stations, told him he’s running into more nests.
Of course, any time you get stung, it's a bad wasp year.
After a sting we often can't get to that can of insecticide fast enough. I've simply been giving my 'jackets some space. No stings yet. And with the advent of cold weather, they will be gone. But my wife wants their home as a piece of nature-art for the sunroom, so they'll be with us in spirit for a while.
When we think of wasps only in terms of the pain they can inflict, it's good to remember that we have something very profound in common. In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, esteemed biologist Edward O. Wilson reminds us that eusocial species -- the truly social species, where multiple generations live together and divide tasks -- are rare. They include a bipedal primate that went from scavenging the savannas of Africa to managing hedge funds, building nuclear missiles, and composing sonatas, and, some 20,000 species of wasps, bees, ants, and termites.
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