What Paper Wasps Stay at Your Place?

At the CB we enjoy the company of at least four species of paper wasps. This one, Polistes exclamans, is our most abundant paper wasp this year. This nest is located under the eave of the front porch by the front door and is one of two big and seven little nests situated on the front porch. We are talking in the neighborhood of maybe a hundred total wasps inhabiting the front porch.

Therefore, when the delivery men arrived at the front door with Rayetta’s newest exercise machine, Crumby met them at the front door with some trepidation.

The wasps normally don’t bother anybody unless you bump them. So stay low, move slowly and deliberately. Especially, don't fix to grab or bump into a nest. Probably they won’t attack us, maybe.

That was good advice. The fact is, paper wasps generally only attack if you bump into their nest. Which is why they situate those nests in hard to access spots. So if they get you, it’s probably your own fault. But that’s always the case.

In addition to the front porch, the paper wasps have taken over the side porch. Plus they have some random nests under the eaves of the homestead, generally. Which means the total population is well over two hundred, not counting babies.

This picture was shot through the glass of a glass door, fairly dirty. Crumby was afraid that maybe if he shot the picture from outside, the flash might set off the wasps. So just to be safe, he took the picture from the inside, looking out, through the dirty glass.

These particular paper wasps we are now discussing, Polistes exclamans, eat caterpillars. They even eat Chlosyne lacinia caterpillars, not to mention the infamous pecan webworms(Hyphantria cunea).

artistic depiction of the pecan webworm moth or muth, Hyphantria









However, there are no way enough of the paper wasps to make a pretense of biological control of the Chlosyne dynamo dominos. But with respect to the pecan webworms, lots of paper wasps seems to correlate with low numbers of webworms. This may be non causative though, a mere accident. At any rate, the CB has no webs yet. Although, the neighbors have webs. Mercy!