Wasps Nest In A Nest Box  

I have a wasps nest in my garden this year, for around 12 or 13 years Blue Tits have nested every year in this particular box, but not this year. I wonder if many of them didn't make it through the bad winter

we had.

      

So its wasps, I should really say its a queen wasp, who's decided to take up residence this year and start building her nest in the vacant nest box.

  I personally don't mind them being there, the box is high up on a wall in a corner, so their flight path is well above my head if I'm in that part of the garden. They seem to fly straight for the woods at the back of my house without bothering to stop around in my garden, so its a quite amicable situation.If the nest was in the ground or low down and I didn't know about it and stepped on it, or had young children around to think about, then that would be a different matter.

Its quite interesting to watch their comings and goings. I had a video camera on them the other day, and when I slowed the clips down I was surprised to see how clumsy they can be when coming in for a landing at the nest box hole. Its was quite amusing when I saw the two wasps collide.

There is usually at least one, of the wasps on guard at the entrance to the nest, sometimes two or three.

It can be a little unnerving  taking photos of them close up, the camera is about five feet away from him here. He watches me carefully, as I watch him, they do have quite a menacing, alien looking face as he sits there, assessing the threat level I represent. I can imagine at this point hes on amber alert!!!!!, potential danger detected within comfort zone mode. They are not cute, but they have an attitude that deserves, nay,,, demands respect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Something unusual happened at waspville the other day

For me, it was just another morning, same routine, get up, cup of tea, a slice of toast, read emails, then check the garden. All was well, and how it was the day before. As I was just about to go back into my house, I glanced up at the bird box I have in the corner of my garden. The one with the wasps nest in it, Ive spoken about it in another post. Well,, today there was something definitely going on out of the ordinary. The entrance to the box was covered in wasps, and there was quite a frenzy going on. I am quite knowledgeable about wildlife, so my first thought was, the nest is being attacked by other wasps or hornets,,,,,,, I must get some photos of this.

I took a few photos, admittedly from a distance, but they didn't seem to be in war path mode, and didn't bother  me. so I moved closer to take some more, and upon closer inspection of the photos, and the area under the nest, there seemed to be no battle going on, no dead wasps or attackers had fallen under the nest. Ruling my first impression of what was going on out.

The interesting thing was when I had a close look at the photos was that there were several queen sized wasps around the entrance to the nest. This is June, from what Ive read, wasps are supposed to produce queen wasps in the Autumn (September, November) by feeding the developing grubs a different diet from worker grubs. Then the new queens fly off and mate with a male wasp from another nest, who dies shortly afterward, and the new queen wasp then hibernates over winter to start up another nest the following year.

My thoughts are, this is a miniture snapshot of evolution in action,  we had a very hard early start to winter here, it started in November with severe conditions that only the fittest for purpose would have survived. So those that did make it through that time would have to have been deep in hibernation before then, we then had quite a mild spring. So subsequently the ones that hibernated early on, would be active far earlier on than others of their kind when the winter had passed.