Western yellowjacket
The western yellowjacket is a yellow and black striped wasp. It usually has a yellow ring around each eye, like a pair of glasses. It lives in big families in a paper nest that it builds underground.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Its nest is made of paper that it makes by chewing wood. It is often hidden 10 to 15 centimetres under the ground, in an old mouse hole or log.
Only the queen lives through the winter. In spring she starts a brand new nest all by herself.
Worker wasps live only about 22 to 40 days.
Cold winters keep their numbers down. Where there is no cold winter, like in Hawaii, they can become a big pest.
It looks a lot like the German wasp. The yellow ring around the eye helps tell them apart.
Most asked questions about Western yellowjacket
?Where do western yellowjackets build their nests?
Mostly underground, in old rodent holes or rotting logs, about 10 to 15 centimetres deep.
?What do yellowjackets eat?
They drink nectar and hunt other insects, which they chew up for their babies.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Vespula pensylvanica
- Named by
- de Saussure, 1857
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- North America, Australia and Oceania
- Also known as
- Western yellow jacket
Where the facts come from
- Vespula pensylvanica (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Eugene Zelenko. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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