What Happens to Wasps in Winter? Only the Queens Survive

Autumn: the end of the colony

A common wasp colony lives for only one year. By late summer it has reached its peak, with several thousand workers, and it switches to rearing new queens and males. Once that job is done, the colony begins to fall apart.

The old queen, worn out after months of egg-laying, dies. Without her, the colony loses its organization: some workers start laying eggs that develop into males, hunting slows down and food runs short. As the nights get colder, the remaining workers and males die of cold and hunger, usually by October or November in Britain and northern Europe. The last weeks of the colony are when hungry workers hunt for sugar so persistently; see why are wasps more aggressive in late summer?

Young queens: the colony’s only survivors

Everything the colony does in summer is aimed at producing the next generation of queens. A large nest rears hundreds of them. They are bigger than workers and are fed generously as larvae, building up a large fat body, a store of energy that has to last them through winter.

In late summer and autumn the young queens leave the nest and mate with males, often from other colonies. They store the sperm in a special organ and will use it the following year to fertilize eggs. The males die soon after the mating season, and the newly mated queens set off to find somewhere safe to spend the winter.

Size matters for survival. Studies of common wasps have found that smaller queens, with less stored fat, are more likely to die during winter than larger ones.

Where do queen wasps hibernate?

Queens look for sheltered, stable places that stay cool, dry and out of reach of predators. Typical sites include:

• Under loose bark and inside rotting logs and stumps
• In leaf litter, soil cavities and old rodent burrows
• Crevices in walls, stone piles and woodpiles
• Sheds, garages, lofts and the folds of curtains, tarpaulins or stored fabrics

A hibernating queen often grips the surface with her jaws, with her wings folded beneath her body and her legs and antennae tucked in. There is no colony to keep her warm or fed; she survives entirely on her own resources.

Insect hibernation is properly called diapause, a state of suspended development in which the body’s activity slows down dramatically. The queen does not eat for several months and lives on her fat reserves, usually from about October until spring.

Surviving the cold

Winter is dangerous even for a well-fed queen. Spiders, birds and small mammals find and eat hibernating wasps, molds can kill them in damp hiding places, and a hiding place that floods or dries out can be fatal. Warm spells are another risk, because a queen that wakes too early burns precious fat and finds no flowers to feed on.

A queen that picks a heated house can be fooled into waking in midwinter, which is why people sometimes find a large, sluggish wasp on a window in January. These early risers rarely survive. Overall, only a small fraction of the young queens produced in late summer go on to found a successful colony the next year.

Spring: a new nest from scratch

As the weather warms, usually from about March to May in Britain and much of Europe, the surviving queens wake up. Their first need is energy, and they feed on nectar from early flowers. Then each queen flies low over the ground, inspecting holes, banks, hedges and buildings for a nest site.

Once she has chosen a spot, the queen scrapes wood fibers from weathered timber, chews them into pulp and builds a small paper nest about the size of a golf ball, with a few dozen cells hanging from a stalk inside a paper shell. She lays an egg in each cell and hunts insects to feed her larvae entirely on her own. About a month later the first workers emerge, take over the outside work, and the yearly cycle starts again.

Are old wasp nests ever reused?

No. A common wasp nest is used for a single season. Once the colony dies in autumn, the empty nest is abandoned; in winter it gradually dries out, crumbles or is torn apart by birds and other animals. New queens do not move into old nests, although occasionally a queen builds a new nest in the same place as an old one, because the site is still suitable.

Colonies that survive mild winters

In regions with mild winters, the rules can bend. In parts of New Zealand and Australia, where yellowjackets are invasive, some colonies survive the winter, more often in German wasps than in common wasps. In the southern United States, nests of the southern yellowjacket can persist through winter and grow to enormous size, sometimes with tens of thousands of wasps and several egg-laying queens.

Do other wasps and bees hibernate too?

Most social insects in cold climates use a similar strategy. Queens of the European hornet and of bumblebees hibernate alone, just like common wasp queens, while their colonies die in autumn. Paper wasps also overwinter as mated females, which often gather in groups in sheltered crevices.

The western honey bee is the main exception. Its colonies survive winter as a whole, with thousands of workers huddled in a warm cluster around the queen, living on stored honey. For other animals that sleep through the cold, see animals that hibernate.