Field Notes—

The Paper Wasp’s Secrets Of Success

By Curtiss Clark

They appear in April as advance agents of the sun, bearing the hot color of summer in their exoskeletal stripes. They bring yellow heat to spring’s cool greening of the world in May. For those of us who come upon them suddenly with bared limbs in the season’s first garden sweat, they evoke an immediate involuntary fear of burning venom beneath the skin. But as stinging insects go, paper wasps are pretty cool cucumbers.

The founding members of a nascent colony of wasps bobbed around the opening of a decorative cutout in a garden ornament at the edge of our strawberry patch last weekend. I had cleared out a similar group of interlopers two weeks ago, but the wasps were back trying again to establish a nest in what clearly was a prime location.

Despite their fierce look, wasps are not aggressive like hornets and yellowjackets. They are more like honeybees in their tolerance of creatures moving around nearby. They can be provoked by direct threats to their colony, but for the most part they go lightly about their business of building elegant paper nests, raising a brood, and doing whatever it takes to survive another year, as they have been doing successfully for 200 million years.

We tend to view wasps through the lens of our own fear, so to most people they look alien and menacing. But putting our fear aside and looking at them as objects — amber-winged flying objects — they are absolutely beautiful.

It turns out, they have beloved faces — to their families anyway. Four years ago, Elizabeth Tibbetts, a doctoral candidate at Cornell studying animal behavior and neurobiology, found that in addition to the usual chemical cues social insects use to identify members and nonmembers of their particular tribe, paper wasps are also using visual cues.

Specifically, she found that there is individual recognition between wasps based on facial markings. By painting alterations to the yellow stripes on the faces of selected wasps, she noticed that the masqueraders were forsaken by former “friends,” and fights broke out among wasps that had peacefully collaborated before. Chemically, they smelled right, but visually, they presented a threat and got the bum’s rush.

Family life is complicated for paper wasps, no matter what their stripes. As in most families, complications are always on the menu at mealtime.

Like most social insects, the adults in the nest feed the larvae as they develop into fully formed wasps. Another researcher, this time at Yale, has noticed the adults, especially the queens, beg their young for nourishment as well.

Look closely at a wasp, and you will see that the thorax (the upper segment) is attached to the abdomen by just a narrow tube. Digestion in a wasp takes place in the abdomen, so the adult’s diet is necessarily liquid. The larvae, however, are more wormlike and can eat solids (e.g., caterpillars and other insect larvae) fed to them by the adults. Through their own digestion, the larvae turn these solids into nutrient-rich saliva that is fed back to adults.

Because there are all sorts of parasites and insect competitors hanging around the nest, the wasp larvae need some kind of signal to identify a legitimate and worthy relative to feed. The adult wasps give this dinner bell signal by dragging their abdomens across the nest, producing a vibration that elicits the meal.

Adults depending on kids to serve a nutritious meal — that’s something you don’t see every day.

Still, for me the most fascinating thing about the paper wasp is its modest nest. It is small, simple, and elegant. The single comb is hung from a stem like an umbrella, protected mostly by its location under the eave or gutter, or any other propitious nook, like the one in my garden ornament. It isn’t a big showy thing like the paper football-shaped nests of hornets.

The solitary wasp queens that emerge from hibernation in the spring start small with a delicate paper comb of just a dozen or so hexagonal cells made from a premasticated maché of cellulose plant materials. Initially, they rear a small brood to help as the summer wears on with raising and feeding a much larger colony. The comb can get as big as a hand. The colony, which can grow to scores, even a hundred wasps or more, remains quite small when compared to the nests of other social insects. It is a village hamlet when compared to the urban-scale nests and hives of yellowjackets, hornets, and honeybees, which house populations of thousands, even tens of thousands of individual insects.

The pace of the paper wasp is slower and more deliberate than their big city cousins. They look menacing and aggressive in their hot yellow stripes, but they really are more like sleepy kids in fierce pajamas, doing what they do without great ambition other than to make it through another year and then another 200 million after that.

That’s the secret of their success. Take it easy. Keep it simple. Make sure everyone’s satisfied, especially the elders. And never forget the face of a friend.