Winter Wasp

Today’s Backyard Nature: wasp rescue. I found this wasp floating—motionless, submerged—in a bucket of water. My bucket, my fault. I hadn’t realized that last month’s snow had blown into the porch, filled the bucket, and melted. So, I fished her out and laid her on a rock. Within a minute, she moved a front leg, and the other, and began walking to higher ground.

I should tell you she’s been a house guest since first frost. She showed up on the wall of the laundry room and stayed put for weeks. Then on a warm day, she got restless, and rather than let her wander into the kitchen, I carried her to the screened porch where I thought she’d be fine: safe from predators and bad weather, with places to hide and to escape. And then, boom, the bucket of (almost) doom.

Now I don’t know where she is.

I know she’s a she because paper wasp queens are the only paper wasps able to live through Nashville winters. They’ve got the fat and sugars to make it through diapause, and come spring, they’ll craft a fresh nest so they can lay the first batch of eggs.

I should say “future foundress:” she’s one of last year’s females who is already fertilized, already fat and sassy, and whose goal is to survive long enough to found and maintain a new colony.

Despite the common name “Guinea paper wasp,” she’s native here. Polistes exclamans.

These are the wasps who make open, circular nests one cell deep, with a typical max of 50-100 cells. The whole disc hangs from a stem, like a downward-facing sunflower seed-head.

Here’s a view looking straight up at the nest in my porch light.

Paper wasps make paper by scraping posts and plants with their jaws, mixing the fibers with saliva, and then—somehow—spitting out perfectly perfect, hexagonal chambers.

A side view of this old nest reveals strata of different colors, from the different plants used in each mouthful of pulp.

Every spring, a queen makes a colony inside our porch light.
I get used to the wasps. They get used to me.
They don’t mind when the door slams. They don’t mind when I poke my face into the fixture to stare. 

It’s fun to watch them fan the nest on hot summer days, to keep larvae and pupae cool.
Fan = a wasp stands still and flaps like mad:

A few minutes later, another wasp takes a turn, but on a different part of the nest.

Winter Nest: Take it or Leave it?

Here’s what I’ve noticed: if you take away the empty nest in winter, the new queen will make a new nest right there in spring. 
If you do NOT take away the empty nest, the foundress will “found” elsewhere.
Wasps don’t re-use a nest, which could be full of parasites or other dangers to their young.

So, if you have a nest in the “wrong” place, leave it. 
But if you have a nest you enjoy watching, take it down in winter, and you’ll likely have a new one in spring.

More:
Guinea paper wasps capture caterpillars and other invertebrates to feed their larvae; and the adults eat “nectar and juice from ripe fruit.” They have many predators, large and small. Males can’t sting. Females can, if threatened. So do not threaten.

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Bio:
Joanna Brichetto is a naturalist and writer in Nashville, the Hackberry-tree capital of the world.
She writes about everyday marvels amid everyday habitat loss at SidewalkNature.com and on Instagram (@Jo_Brichetto); and her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, The Hopper, Flyway, The Common, The Fourth River, and other journals.
Her almanac of short essays is forthcoming from Trinity University Press, and is called This is How a Robin Drinks: and Other Essays of Urban Nature.