1608_0945 Yellow Jacket
A common Yellow Jacket sips a little water from my back yard birdbath. I grow flowers along with my vegetables, both to beautify and to attract insects of all sorts. Although they look menacing, and prey on other insects, generally these vespid wasps are not aggressive toward humans. I work in close with a macro lens and have never been stung. Some years ago I read that most wasp stings occur in the fall when queens leave the nest to mate and start a new colony elsewhere. This leaves the workers without a common purpose: it's every wasp for itself and they become more aggressive than normal, and more likely to sting. (I hope this information is accurate, as I haven't taken the time to google it for verification!)
Yellow Jackets are welcome in my back yard, but this doesn't extend to building their nests from the eaves or any other part of my house. Twenty years ago, on Vancouver Island, some yellow jackets constructed a nest very close to a family of Violet-green Swallows, very high on the house I was renting, too high for me to reach. "Oh, no!" I thought, "Those wasps are going to sting the baby birds to death." Ha! Within a week there wasn't a wasp in sight; the parent birds had caught them all and fed them to their nestlings. Nature tends to take care of itself if we just leave things alone.
Photographed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan. Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2016 James R. Page - all rights reserved.
1608_0945 Yellow Jacket
A common Yellow Jacket sips a little water from my back yard birdbath. I grow flowers along with my vegetables, both to beautify and to attract insects of all sorts. Although they look menacing, and prey on other insects, generally these vespid wasps are not aggressive toward humans. I work in close with a macro lens and have never been stung. Some years ago I read that most wasp stings occur in the fall when queens leave the nest to mate and start a new colony elsewhere. This leaves the workers without a common purpose: it's every wasp for itself and they become more aggressive than normal, and more likely to sting. (I hope this information is accurate, as I haven't taken the time to google it for verification!)
Yellow Jackets are welcome in my back yard, but this doesn't extend to building their nests from the eaves or any other part of my house. Twenty years ago, on Vancouver Island, some yellow jackets constructed a nest very close to a family of Violet-green Swallows, very high on the house I was renting, too high for me to reach. "Oh, no!" I thought, "Those wasps are going to sting the baby birds to death." Ha! Within a week there wasn't a wasp in sight; the parent birds had caught them all and fed them to their nestlings. Nature tends to take care of itself if we just leave things alone.
Photographed in Val Marie, Saskatchewan. Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission © 2016 James R. Page - all rights reserved.