Although you can't see them, the nests are much like hornet
nests, consisting of several horizontal tiers of
honeycomblike cells all enclosed in a paper sheath. The
entrance hole to such a nest may be no larger than a
quarter, but the nest itself can be as big as, or bigger
than, a bald-faced hornet's. Another yellow jacket species,
Vespula germanica , builds equally large nests
inside the walls of buildings.
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Generally speaking, yellow jackets have nastier tempers
than other paper wasps, but they are not the maddened
winged terrorists so many people make them out to be, and
seldom sting, as is often heard, "at the least
provocation." The real trouble with yellow jackets is that
you can't see the nest until you've blundered across it,
either stepping on the entrance or running over it with a
tractor or lawn mower. Wall-nesting germanica
yellow jackets are similarly hazardous, because they tend
to chew away the plasterboard and insulation in a wall
until only a paper-thin barrier remains between the nest
and the inside of the building. Pity the unsuspecting
homeowner who, upon hearing a buzzing and scraping inside a
wall, knocks on the surface to locate the source—only
to put his fist into a mass of yellow jackets.
The third major group of common paper wasps encompasses a
number of similar-looking species all belonging to the
genus Polistes . Depending on where you live,
these slender, hard-bodied wasps may be brown, rust-colored
or black, or they may have yellow or black stripes. They
build relatively simple nests consisting of a single,
unenclosed comb suspended from a short stem. Because their
nests have no roof or walls, Polistes wasps build
their homes where they'll be out of the rain—under
shed roofs, inside double-hung windows, beneath eaves.
Polistes wasps are the gentlest of paper wasps and
seldom attack unless provoked. They can inflict a
painful sting, though—it was a Polistes that
injected the fear of wasps into my toddler-size neck many
years ago.
The Life Cycle
Though each type has its idiosyncrasies, yellow jackets,
hornets and Polistes wasps have similar life histories.
Except in tropical regions, paper wasp communities are
single-season affairs. Each is begun in spring by a female
that, the previous fall, mated with one or more males and
then spent the winter hibernating in a protected
place—often beneath the bark of a tree or log, or
between boards in an attic or basement. When the queen
emerges from hibernation in the spring, she dines on flower
nectar to restore her strength, then selects a nesting site
and begins to build. She collects fibers from old boards,
branches, fence posts and other sources, pulling up the
pieces with her jaws and chewing and mixing them with
saliva to form a small pellet of
papier-mâchê-like pulp. Then she flies back to
the nest site, where she spreads the pellet out to form a
paper-thin layer. Shuttling back and forth, gathering
material and returning to apply it, she builds the
foundation and a few shallow cells.
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