For those of us who’ve already been stung by a fierce yellow jacket this year, here’s an uncomfortable thought: As we move deeper into summer, there will be more and more yellow jackets around — from hundreds in an underground nest now to thousands per nest in late summer.
Besides yellow jackets, Georgia, of course, is home to a variety of other summertime stinging wasps and bees — including paper wasps, mud daubers, hornets, honeybees, bumblebees and others. But it’s the yellow jacket — a highly social, half-inch-long wasp with yellow-and-black banding — that most draws human wrath.
The aggressive yellow jacket’s ferocity and fiery stings can ruin a picnic or make working in the garden or mowing the lawn a nightmare. Unlike a bee, which stings only once and loses its stinger in the process, a yellow jacket keeps on stinging. And while she (only females sting) is attacking an intruder, she also releases a chemical that prompts her nest mates to boil out of the ground and join the fight.
“Yellow jacket colonies will defend their nest to the death, fighting tooth and nail,” says James Murphy, a University of Georgia agricultural agent in Rockdale County.
Actually, yellow jackets can be helpful to gardeners in spring when they are less aggressive and prey on an array of caterpillars and other agricultural pests to feed their larvae. But that can change in midsummer, when such prey dwindles and yellow jackets become ready-to-fight scavengers, turning to foods like meat and sweets — including ham sandwiches and open cans of Coke on picnic tables. Swatting the insects away invites their stings.
By late summer and early fall, underground yellow jacket colonies become bigger and more aggressive — an especially dangerous situation if you run a lawn mower over a nest’s entrance hole. The insects’ anger may have you running for your life.
As cold weather arrives, most yellow jackets die off. About the only survivors are the queens, which can live through winter and start new colonies in spring.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: Look for a thin crescent moon in the west on Thursday. Mercury is low in the east just before sunrise. Venus and Mars are low in the west just after dark. Jupiter and Saturn rise in the east after midnight.
Charles Seabrook can be reached at charles.seabrook@yahoo.com.
About the Author
