Wasps are usually not noticed until late summer, when they greedily pounce en masse on our cake and grill plates. But there are also wasps in spring - where they hang around and what their spring to-do list looks like is all dedicated to the late summer peak phase.
In the spring, wasps have their wings full
The Queen's Awakening
The first thing a wasp needs to do in the year is to establish a new colony or, in the case of solitary wasp species, a small nest. This task falls to a single queen who was fertilized the previous fall and survived the winter in a cold torpor.
As the days warm up and the Queen wakes up from her hibernation, here are the things on her to-do list:
- Find shelter for the nest
- create a nest
- lay eggs
- Raise first larvae
- Breeding more 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 burrow, a pile of stones or, in the case of the large social wasp species, attics and roller shutter boxes in people's homes.
The first brood chambers are created there, for which the wasp usually collects wood as building material.
In the brood chambers she lays a first round of eggs. Once the larvae have hatched, they must be fed. To do this, the queen has to constantly fly out and bring in food in the form of proteinaceous insects. In all wasp species, the larvae are exclusively carnivores.
After the pupation phase, the first generation of finished wasps is there, which are now available as energetic workers. The queen can now retreat to the nest and concentrate solely on laying more eggs. They and the hatching larvae are now cared for by the swarming workers.
In the case of social wasp species, i.e. above all the German and 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 used by wasps that form colonies to breed as large a worker army as possible in order to take care of the important sexual animals that will then be added in late summer. The sexual animals are then responsible for the preservation of the species.