Good Bees and Better Bees

Submitted by Paul Hetzler

On a warm, sunny day in May, bees of various stripes come out of the woodwork, seemingly lost. By definition, it’s only a “real” bee if it’s wearing fur, but not everyone wants to get close enough to see whether the thing is covered in hairs. If it looks and buzzes like a bee, it’s OK to call it one.

Except for folks who are allergic to stings, most people feel rather warm and fuzzy toward honeybees, or at the very least, don’t hate them. Honeybees’ role as pollinators of food crops is widely known, and besides, everyone likes honey.

Wasps, on the other hand, are often reviled and feared, not necessarily in that order. Social wasps such as yellow jackets and bald-faced hornets only play nice with their own kind and are otherwise distinctly antisocial. They can be more dangerous than honeybees because they will vigorously defend their nests. And unlike honeybees, which die after stinging because their venom sac tears away from their abdomen, wasps can sting repeatedly without paying with their lives. It makes you wonder if wasps are some sort of cosmic error, in the same category as poison ivy, rats, and deer ticks. But wasps and hornets actually do a lot of good for our planet.

Solitary wasps, which by the way are much friendlier than social wasps, are beneficial because they prey on insect pests like grasshoppers and emerald ash borers. Though each female wasp digs her own hole, many of these mini nests can be concentrated in an area. You may have crossed a sandy lot and seen holes made by such creatures. If they were very active at the time, you might have been freaked out as they emerged to see what the racket was.

After paralyzing a bug with her sting, Ma Wasp carts it home, stuffs it down the nest-hole and injects eggs into it so her babies can hatch and eat their way out of the hapless victim. Helpful in the scheme of things, but not very neighborly. The largest such critter in our area is called the cicada-killer wasp, a fearsome-looking assassin which is completely harmless. Unless you are a cicada.

At the other end of the scary spectrum are braconid wasps. They’re often beautiful – metallic green or blue – and so tiny that they look like some kind of small fly. These wasps don’t have the horsepower to bring their victims home, so they lay eggs in fly larvae or pupae, and hope for the best. Braconids are among the most important pest-control insects on Earth.

What may come as a surprise is that even the scary wasps are essential pollinators. Not to take anything away from honeybees, but they’re hardly indispensable. Except in areas of extreme intensive agriculture, honeybee presence has no measurable effect on pollination rates. Bumble bees, mason bees and other native bees, along with wasps and various non-bee insects, do the job quite nicely so long as they have access to wild, unkempt areas.

In our climate – I should say thus far at least – wasp colonies do not overwinter. In late summer, each colony will produce a few queens, and a handful of disposable males with whom the queen will mate. Replete with fertilized eggs, queens will overwinter in leaf litter, rotten stumps, sometimes grouping together in eaves, attics or other hibernacula. Every wasp we see at this time of year is a queen looking to found her own city-state, which may be disconcerting news to some. Take heart; they don’t all want to settle on your front porch.

Social wasps are expert papermakers, chewing up wood and creating beautiful, if terrifying, nests. Paper wasps, which are tame by social-wasp standards, make open-faced “umbrella” homes, while hornets and yellow jackets make enclosed, globe-shaped nests. Hornets usually nest aloft, while yellow jackets also make underground homes.

Carpenter bees can gnaw plenty of wood, but they skip the paper-making step and just nest in tunnels in decaying trees or perfectly sound soffit and fascia boards on homes and barns. They provoke anxiety when the male carpenter bees dive-bomb passers-by, even though guy-bees can’t sting.

A nest over your entry door will probably have to be destroyed. Because wasps are so beneficial, please consider leaving nests that are not direct risks.