Wasps At Last

It's been a difficult year for bees, as but they're not alone in that, it's also been a tricky one for wasps. The wet summer has made things difficult for Queen wasps to establish new nests, assuming they'ed survived hibernation and the aphid populations they prey on are down too. Up until today I'd only seen one wasp in my garden all year. Today marked their arrival at the hives. There was nothing like the numbers from last years population boom but there were a few buzzing around. After a little look at an online wasp identification guide I'm pretty sure they were Common Wasps or Vespula Vulgaris if you're feeling pedantic.

Common Wasp with a dead bee

I doubt numbers will be getting high enough for me to have to put traps out but we'll see how it goes. The ones I saw today were content to pick up dead bees from the ground. They have no use for some parts of the bee such as the head, legs and and wings. I filmed one butchering a dead bee.

Whilst my the camera phone work is a little shaky  you can see at the start it removes the bee's head, next it chews off a wing. After rolling over the bark chipping you can see it making short work of a couple of legs. After this it evidently decided it didn't like being watched and took the bee behind a blade of grass and a bark chipping to finish work in a little privacy before flying off taking the thorax and the abdomen.

I think it's fair to say as a society we're a little prone to over reaction when it comes to wasps. The usual reaction upon seeing a wasp is flap about or try to kill it, both of which bump up your chances of being stung. However as you can see I was holding a camera phone about 4 inches from this one whilst a couple more buzzed about out of shot and I didn't get stung, bitten, murdered or otherwise molested by any of them.