We usually only notice wasps in late summer, when they rush en masse and greedily onto our cake and grill plates. But there are also wasps in spring - where they hang out and what their spring to-do list looks like is all dedicated to the late summer peak phase.
What do wasps do in spring?
In spring, the wasp queen wakes up from the cold and begins to establish a new state: she looks for a suitable place for the nest, creates brood chambers, lays eggs and raises the first larvae. Workers are then bred who take over the care of further generations and later the sexual animals.
The Queen's Awakening
The first thing for wasps to do in the year is to found a new state or, in the case of solitary wasp species, a small nest. This task is the responsibility of a single queen, which was fertilized the previous autumn and survived the winter in a cold state.
As the days get warmer and the queen wakes up from her hibernation, the following things are on her to-do list:
- Find shelter for the nest
- Create a nest
- laying eggs
- Raising the first larvae
- Raising additional generations or army of workers
The first thing the queen does is look for a suitable shelter for her nest - depending on the wasp species, this can be a hiding place in tree trunks, an abandoned mouse hole, a pile of stones or, for the large social wasp species, attics and roller shutter boxes be people's homes.
The first breeding chambers are created there, for which the wasp usually collects wood as building material.
She lays the first round of eggs in the brood chambers. Once the larvae have hatched, they need to be fed. To do this, the queen has to constantly fly out and bring in food in the form of protein-containing insects. The larvae of all wasp species are exclusively carnivores.
After the pupation phase, the first generation of wasps is ready and is now available as active workers. The queen can now retreat to the nest and concentrate solely on laying more eggs. You and the hatching larvae are now cared for by the swarming workers.
In social wasp species, especially the German wasp and the common wasp, thousands more workers are produced during the spring. They are initially responsible for caring for the workers who follow them. The rest of the spring is spent on colonizing wasps breeding as large an army of workers as possible in order to take care of the important sexual animals that arrive in late summer. The sexual animals are then responsible for maintaining the species.
