Hi, Folks,
For many years my immediate family and I have been messing with stinging insects of all kinds. In fall (when they are most active), our phones about ring off the hook. After all this time we've pretty well perfected our methods, have had a ton of fun, and made a lot of money from these activities. When a contract is available, we sell the fresh-frozen insects to pharmiceutical companies so that they can use the venom to make anti-allergy shots for the folks that are deathly allergic to them. Prices for yellowjackets are about $550.00 a lb, and $740.00 a lb. for hornets.
Here is one we got this year. This yellowjacket nest was located in my brother's barn out of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and started in a roll of canvas that was leaning against a wall. The first picture was taken from a distance so as to give us a better idea of the environment and setting. While it looks like snow on the ground outside, it's really overexposure from the bright sunlight. The date is mid September, 2011.
Our daughter Jeanne was the first one called to care for it, and she was quite dismayed to find that she didn't have enough equipment to care for it properly. Reluctantly, (she wanted it so bad that she could taste it), she called her brother Zeke. That would spare her another trip to Cottage Grove from Veneta. He got it the next day. I asked him to take a few pictures and these were the results.
The color of the nest is a dead giveaway as to which species they are. These are the Common Yellowjackets (Vespula vulgaris) that always make a nest somewhere between tan and brown, while all the other species in the area (and there are a lot of them) have nests that are weathered fence gray, The following two pictures are shots taken at a progressively closer range so that the details will be clearer. To my thinking, the nest's pattern is one of the prettier things in the natural world, and the engineering is breathtaking.
Vulgaris nearly always start their nests in a protective environment because the nest, while being pretty, is also quite fragile. A good wind could blow the outer covering apart. That was true in this case too. They started inside the canvas roll, and when they ran out of room, they dug right through the canvas to the outside. This excavating is normal, and I've seen them go right through sheetrock (which makes the housewife real happy! Har, har!). When living underground, yellow jackets will dig like mad to provide room for the expanding nest. Some of those holes can end up as big as a large watermelon and (in Oregon) have as many as 7,000 insects in there. The average worker is approximately 12 mm. in length, not counting the antennas or wings.
However, there are a few cases where things become unusual, and this is one of them. These bored right through the canvas to the outside where there was nothing more to dig! Now what? Those members of the nest who are usually assigned to digging have nothing to do, so they turn to building, and the results can be astonishing, as they seem to build just to be building. To illustrate, there is no brood whatsoever on the outside of the roll of canvas under that outer covering. All of it is inside the roll.
Here Zeke has removed the outer covering.
Then he laid the roll on the floor in a horizontal position, and took another picture. You can see a little of the brood peaking out of the crack in the canvas.
Next he pealed the canvas back and took more pictures. Look close and you can see the ragged edges where they chewed the canvas layers away.
Finally, in the last picture the brood is completely exposed. It is taken with the brood in its natural position, upside down. They live in a topsy-turvy world where the larva hang upside down in the cells. There is one interesting thing in this picture though, that is not apparent to the untrained eye. Look closely at the small, bottom layer and compare the size of the cells there to the size of the cells in the rest of the nest. They look bigger, and they are, about 50% bigger, and for good reason.
The life-cycle of the yellow jacket is vastly different than that of honeybees. A yellow jacket queen will start a nest all by herself in the Spring after she wakes up from hibernation. She raises a few workers who start helping her raise more, and this continues until hundreds of workers can be hatching every day. It's not until September or thereabouts that they start thinking about raising the queens for next year, and that is what those larger cells are for. They had just started. If we hadn't taken the nest, in another month they would have had that layer as big as the others, and (given the room) about 3 or 4 more layers to boot - ALL of which would have been devoted to queens. I've seen 500 or more queens in a nest in late fall, every one of which will be fertilized, fattened up, and will then look for a place to sleep over the winter, only to start again in the Spring.
The beauty and complexity of the natural world keeps me enthralled. This is just one small example.
As you can probably tell, our "drug of choice" is adrenalin.
Tom
