BY KIERAN LINDSEY, PhD
Mark Zuckerberg would not be one of 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world without the help of wasps. I mean the six-legged kind (whether or not two-legged WASPs should get any of the credit is something for attorneys to discuss and will not be addressed here).
It’s a lengthy timeline but easy enough to follow*:
There you have it—no social insects, no social primates and, therefore, no need for a social network. When you think about it, Facebook isn’t just an online community. It’s a kind of virtual hive. You and Mark owe more to wasps that you may have ever realized.
Not all wasps are gregarious, mind you. The majority of species, including mud daubers (Sphecidae), pollen wasps (Masarinae) and potter wasps (Eumeninae) are solitary. You know the type… quiet, poorly developed interpersonal skills, keep to themselves, rarely cause much trouble. A lot of them don’t even have stingers and they take the term “wasp-waisted” to extremes. We’ll respect their privacy, at least for now, and come back for a visit some other day.
Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we have two basic types of social wasps: paper wasps (Polistes spp.) and yellowjackets (Vespula spp. and Dolichovespula spp.).
but the introduced European hornet (Vespa crabro), and more recently the Asian giant (aka murder hornet, Vespa mandarinia) are the only true members of that Family found in North America.
With a few exceptions, wasps have two pairs of wings and can be distinguished from bees by that narrow waist (aka petiole) between the thorax and abdomen. The ovipositor (an organ used to prepare and position eggs) of a fertile queen becomes the stinger of an infertile worker females; males are not capable of stinging. Unlike honey bees (Apis spp.), wasps do not leave their stinger behind and are able to deliver multiple injections of venom.
Adult wasps feed on nectar and, as a result, can be classified as pollinators. Some social wasps are omnivorous, feeding on fallen fruit as well as carrion; yellowjackets are especially attracted to open garbage cans and dumpsters, drawn perhaps to the sweet, sticky spillage from nearly empty soda cans and bottles as well as other types of decaying leftovers.
Wasps come in a rainbow of colors, including vivid yellows, metallic blues, and bright reds (keep this helpful rule of thumb in mind when interacting with insects—flamboyant wardrobes usually serve as a “don’t touch!” warning, backed up with some kind of poison or venom). Because they often share a brown or black and yellow color scheme, paper wasps are often misidentified as yellowjackets. I don’t want to encourage you to get up close and personal to make the identification and, luckily, there’s no need. The easiest way to tell them apart is by their nests.
Paper wasps and yellowjackets will nest in trees, under building eaves, in walls, and just about any other place that offers some protection from the elements. Both types of wasp use chewed wood fibers as the main construction material, even when building underground, as yellowjackets often do.
Yellowjackets prefer to raise their young in a kind of fortress that looks more like what we would think of as a hive, with layers and layers of brood cell combs. The whole structure is completely enclosed with the exception of a single entrance hole. Queens establish new colonies each spring, often returning to the site of a previous nest (the location is identified by a chemical scent marker recognizable even to a first-year queen). However, if the structure is particularly well-protected from the weather—in the wall of a house, say—it may become a perennial nest, populated year-round. Yellowjacket hives may range in size from several inches (at the beginning of the colony’s history) to enormous structures measuring six feet or more and housing as many as 20,000 adult workers.