Giant wasp nests cause alarm

by ARTiFactor on Aug. 24th, 2006
in Biological Populations Change Over Time

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yellowjacket wasp: photo from Wikipedia commons

How big can a wasp nest get?

A wasps nest was traded in at Collector's Corner this week. Recently, I have seen articles on the internet of wasps nests so large that they fill up cars or even mobile homes. Normally these nests do not get much bigger than a basketball and contain a few thousand wasps. The super-sized nests may contain as many as 100,000. One mammoth nest discovered in South Carolina contained roughly a quarter-million workers and as many as 100 queens.
Usually all wasps in a nest die from the cold during winter. Only the queen seeks shelter so as to start a new colony the next year.
You can read more giant wasp nest stories here and here.