Identifying a Wasp Nest

First

Is It Actually a Wasp?

This matters more than anything else on the page, because bees should generally be left alone and the treatment is refused for them. Four things you might have:

Common wasp or German wasp. Bright yellow and black, smooth and shiny looking, a very narrow waist, and they hold their legs tucked in flight. These are the ones that build papery nests in lofts, cavities, sheds and the ground.

Honeybee. Browner, furrier, more golden than yellow, and thicker in the middle. A colony in a chimney or a cavity is a beekeeping matter, not a pest control one. A swarm hanging in a cluster on a branch will usually move on within a day or two and a local beekeeper will often collect it.

Bumblebee. Large, very furry, slower and louder. They nest in old rodent holes, compost heaps, bird boxes and under decking. A bumblebee nest is small, it dies out by late summer, and it is best left.

European hornet. Much bigger than a wasp, brown and yellow rather than black and yellow, and far less aggressive than their size suggests. They do build nests that need treating, but they are a good deal less common than people think — most reported hornets are large queen wasps.

The nest

Paper, and Where It Is Hidden

A wasp nest is made of chewed wood mixed with saliva, which is genuinely paper. Grey or greyish-brown, often with visible bands of slightly different shades where different timber was used, and light enough that an empty one feels like nothing in your hand.

It starts in April as a single stalk with a few cells, built by one queen. By midsummer it is the size of a football and can be considerably larger in a loft where there is room.

Where they turn up on properties around here:

• Lofts and roof voids — the most common by a distance, usually hung from a rafter or sitting on the insulation.
• Wall cavities, entered through a gap in the render, an airbrick or under a windowsill.
• Soffits and eaves, with the entrance at a joint in the boarding.
• Sheds, garages and garden furniture stores.
• Underground, in old rodent burrows, banks and compost heaps. Common in gardens here and easy to mow over without seeing.
• Hedges and dense shrubs, which is where people find them with a trimmer.

If you cannot see it

Watch the Traffic

Most nests are never seen at all. What you see is the entrance, and the way to find it is to stand back on a warm afternoon and watch.

A steady two-way stream in and out of one point — a gap in the render, a hole in the lawn, a joint in the soffit — is a nest at that point. Wasps passing through a garden wander; wasps with a nest fly a purposeful line to a single spot and do it all day.

The important thing to understand is that the entrance tells you nothing about the size. A hole you could put a pencil through can serve a nest the size of a beach ball inside a cavity. People routinely describe a nest as small because the bit they can see is small, and that is the assumption behind most of the DIY attempts that go badly.

Old nests

Last Year’s Is Empty

Wasps never reuse a nest. The colony dies off over the winter and only new queens survive, individually, tucked away somewhere else entirely.

So a nest found in a loft in February is a dry papery shell from last summer. It is harmless, it will not be recolonised, and it can be taken down and binned. The only caveat is that a site that suited one queen often suits another, so a new nest may appear nearby in the spring — in a new nest, not the old one.

Short answers

Questions, Briefly

Where to go next

The Pages That Answer This