Common Wasp (Vespula vulgaris): Yellowjacket Facts and Nests

What does a common wasp look like?

The common wasp is a smooth, shiny insect with a bold warning pattern of bright yellow and black bands. Unlike a honey bee, it has very little hair, a narrow pinched waist and a pointed abdomen, and it folds its wings lengthwise along the body at rest. The face is yellow, usually with a single black anchor- or dagger-shaped mark on the plate above the jaws, and the antennae are black.

A colony contains three kinds of adult:

Workers weigh about 0.08 g (0.003 oz). Males appear only in late summer and can be told apart by their longer antennae and an extra visible segment at the tip of the abdomen. Males have no stinger.

Common wasp, German wasp and yellowjackets

In Britain and Ireland the common wasp is simply “the wasp”, while in North America the same kind of insect is called a yellowjacket, a name for social wasps of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula. Its closest look-alike in Europe is the German wasp (Vespula germanica), which usually has three small black dots on its face instead of an anchor mark and builds grayer nests.

Until 2010, the native yellowjacket found across northern North America was treated as the same species as the common wasp. Studies of its anatomy and DNA showed that it is a separate species, now called Vespula alascensis, so the true common wasp is not native to North America. The German wasp, by contrast, has been introduced and spread widely in the United States. To compare wasps with their relatives, see bee vs wasp and hornet vs wasp.

Habitat and range

The common wasp lives across Europe, from Ireland and Portugal to Scandinavia, and east through temperate Asia to China. It is a highly adaptable insect, found in woodland, grassland, heaths, farmland, orchards, parks, gardens and city centers, wherever it can find insects to hunt, sugar to drink and a sheltered place to nest.

Most nests are underground, often in an old rodent burrow that the workers enlarge by carrying out soil. Others are built in hollow trees, wall cavities, sheds, roof spaces and bird boxes.

People have accidentally carried the common wasp to other continents. It became established in New Zealand in the late 1970s, is found in parts of southeastern Australia and has more recently reached Argentina. In these places it is an invasive species.

What do common wasps eat?

Common wasps have a split diet. Adults mostly drink sugary liquids: flower nectar, juice from ripe and damaged fruit, tree sap and honeydew, the sweet waste produced by aphids and scale insects. The protein the workers collect goes to the larvae.

Workers hunt a wide range of insects and spiders, especially caterpillars and flies, and also take bees and other wasps. They kill or subdue prey with their jaws, and sometimes their sting, chew it into a ball of meat and fly it back to the nest. They also scavenge scraps from carcasses, fish, meat and pet food. Common wasps sometimes rob honey bee hives, taking both honey and bee larvae.

In return for food, the larvae give the workers droplets of a clear, sugary saliva. This exchange of food, called trophallaxis, is an important energy source for the workers and helps explain why their behavior changes in late summer, when larvae become scarce. The ecological value of all this hunting is explained in what is the point of wasps?

The paper nest

A common wasp nest is made of paper. Workers scrape fibers from weathered wood, such as old fence posts, sheds and dead branches, and chew them with saliva into a soft pulp. Laid down in thin strips, the pulp dries into a brittle, tan-colored paper.

Inside, the nest contains several horizontal combs of six-sided cells, stacked in tiers and joined by short paper pillars. The cells open downward, and each holds a single larva hanging head-down. The combs are wrapped in a thick envelope of many paper layers with air pockets that help keep the nest warm, and there is a single entrance near the bottom. The first comb hangs from a stalk, and the queen smears a substance that repels ants around its base.

Workers keep the brood at roughly 30 °C (86 °F), shivering their flight muscles to warm the nest and fanning their wings to cool it. A nest begins in spring at about the size of a golf ball and by late summer is often as big as a basketball, with thousands of cells; nests in roof spaces can grow larger.

Colony life cycle

Each colony lives for one year. In spring, usually from April in Britain, a queen emerges from hibernation, feeds on nectar and searches for a nest site. She builds a small paper nest with a few dozen cells, lays an egg in each, and raises the first brood alone, hunting for her larvae. About a month later the first workers emerge.

From then on, the queen stays inside and lays eggs while the workers do everything else. The colony grows rapidly through early summer and reaches its peak in late summer, when a nest may hold several thousand workers. At this point the workers build larger cells, and the colony switches to producing hundreds of new queens and males.

New queens and males leave the nest to mate in late summer and autumn. The old queen dies, the colony falls apart, and the remaining workers and males die of cold and hunger by late autumn. Only the young mated queens survive, hibernating in sheltered places; see what happens to wasps in winter? The late-season change in the colony is why wasps pester picnics, explained in why are wasps more aggressive in late summer?

Workers live only a few weeks. The youngest work inside the nest, and older workers forage outside; the oldest often spend their final days guarding the entrance.

The sting and real risk

Only female wasps can sting, because the stinger is a modified egg-laying tube. A common wasp’s stinger has only tiny barbs and usually slides back out of the skin, so a single wasp can sting several times. The venom causes sharp pain, redness and swelling, and it contains an alarm pheromone that can call other workers to attack, especially near the nest. Read more in can a wasp sting more than once?

Foraging wasps rarely sting unless they are trapped, swatted or squeezed, but they defend their nest vigorously. For most people a sting is painful but harmless. A small share of people are allergic, and for them a single sting can cause anaphylaxis, a severe whole-body reaction. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted an average of about 62 deaths a year from hornet, wasp and bee stings between 2000 and 2017.

The best protection is to stay calm, avoid swatting and keep well away from nests. If someone stung has trouble breathing, swelling of the face or throat, or feels faint, seek emergency medical help immediately: call 911 in the US, 112 in the EU or 999 in the UK.

Predators and parasites

Despite their stings, common wasps have plenty of enemies. The European honey buzzard, a bird of prey that visits Europe in summer, specializes in digging out wasp nests to eat the larvae and pupae, and dense, scale-like feathers on its face help protect it from stings. Badgers also dig up nests, and European hornets, robber flies and spiders catch adult wasps.

Inside the nest live other uninvited guests. Larvae of several large hoverflies of the genus Volucella scavenge debris and feed on wasp brood, and the larvae of the beetle Metoecus paradoxus develop as parasites on wasp larvae.

An invader abroad

The common wasp has become one of the most damaging invasive insects in New Zealand. In the honeydew beech forests of the South Island, scale insects on the trees produce sweet honeydew, and common wasps reach some of the highest densities recorded for any wasp. Researchers have estimated that at their summer peak, the combined weight of wasps in these forests can rival or exceed that of all the forest birds.

There the wasps take much of the honeydew that native birds such as the kākā, tūī and bellbird depend on, and they prey heavily on native insects and spiders. They also compete with honey bees and are a hazard for people working and walking in the forest.

Conservation status and people

The common wasp has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List. It is abundant throughout its native range and is not considered threatened.

For people, the common wasp is a mixed blessing. It is a painful nuisance at late-summer picnics and in orchards and beehives, but it is also a major predator of caterpillars, flies and other insects that eat crops and garden plants. Like other wasps, it plays an important role in keeping insect populations in check and feeds many other animals in turn.