Mrs Dunne found this wasps nest in her garden shed. It is a work of art and a thing of beauty.
These wasps are social insects, that means that they live in a group. What happens is in early spring a young fertilised queen wasp wakens from hibernation and looks for a suitable nesting site, like inside a shed, in a hole in a tree, or some other dry place. The queen looks for some wood, like a fence, shed, dry stem of a dead plant and using her strong mouth rasps the wood. You can hear this on a quiet day. She chews this and makes a strong stem on the roof of her selected site. She builds a few cells and lays an egg in each downward pointing cell. Before the larvae hatch the queen surrounds the cells with a tiny shell of wasp paper leaving only a tiny flight hole on the bottom. The queen feeds the larvae on well chewed caterpillars and flies. After about 2 weeks the larvae spin a top to its cell and pupate. These hatch into worker wasps and take over the nest building, cell making duties and leave the queen to lay eggs. They enlarge the nest to the size we see here. By late summer there may be thousands of wasps in the colony. Adult wasps eat only sweet things, such as nectar, honeydew (secreted by greenfly) and ripe fruit. Young larvae eat chewed up live food. As the summer progresses larger cells are constructed in which male wasps and queens are raised. These leave the nest and mate and the fertilised queens eat well and prepare to hibrnate.
Meanwhile back at the nest, the old queen stops laying, and the workers with nothing to do gorge on any sweet things they can find. They can become a nuisance around bins, in orchards etc. The old queen slowly dies of starvation and as autumn approaches the other wasps die also. This just leaves the hibernating fertilised queens to start the process in early spring
