Whether a wasp nest survives the winter is a common question, often rooted in the misconception that social wasps operate like honeybees. For species like yellowjackets and hornets, the colony operates on an annual cycle, and the answer is almost always no. The entire society built during the warm months is eliminated by the cold, leaving behind only a select few individuals who carry the lineage forward. This life cycle involves a specialized decline and rebirth that resets every year.
The Annual Decline: Winter’s Impact on the Colony
The vast wasp colony, containing thousands of sterile female workers, male drones, and the original queen, begins its dissolution in late summer and early autumn. This collapse is driven not by cold temperatures alone, but by a biological shift caused by shortening daylight hours. This cue triggers the colony to cease producing new workers and focus on creating a final, reproductive generation.
Once the new queens and males have matured and left the nest to mate, the original queen stops egg-laying, devastating the social structure. Worker wasps rely on a sugary secretion produced by the larvae as their primary food source. With no new larvae to feed, this supply of liquid sugar disappears, and the workers become starved and disorganized.
The remaining workers, male drones, and the original founding queen subsequently perish as the weather cools and food sources become scarce. The colony’s death is a swift process of starvation and exposure, ensuring the entire generation, except for the newly fertilized females, is eliminated before winter. This mass die-off concludes the seasonal colony cycle.
The Winter Survivor: How New Queens Hibernate
The only colony members that survive the winter are the newly fertilized females, known as gynes, who represent the next generation of queens. Gynes spend the autumn consuming massive amounts of food to build up fat reserves. This stored energy is the sole fuel source they rely on for the next six to eight months.
The gynes then enter a state called diapause, a hormonally programmed dormancy that drastically suppresses their metabolic rate and conserves energy. This is not true hibernation but an arrested development where the queen’s body functions are put on hold. She seeks out a sheltered, insulated location where the temperature remains stable and above freezing.
Typical overwintering sites include protected crevices such as under loose tree bark, within the soil, inside hollow logs, or within the voids of man-made structures like attics and wall spaces. Gynes remain completely inactive throughout the winter, their survival dependent on the quality of their fat stores and the insulation of their chosen refuge. Most gynes do not survive, but the few that emerge in spring begin a new colony.
The Fate of the Physical Nest
The wasp nest is an annual construction completely abandoned once the colony dies in late autumn or early winter. Nests are composed of paper-like material, which workers create by chewing wood fibers and mixing them with saliva. This material is not durable enough to withstand the severe weather of an entire winter season.
The abandoned nest is prone to structural damage from rain, snow, and freezing temperatures, causing it to degrade over time. More importantly, the queen will not reuse an old nest because it harbors parasites, pathogens, and detritus from the previous colony. Starting fresh ensures the new brood is raised in a clean, disease-free environment, making the old nest a relic of the previous season.
Restarting the Cycle in Spring
The end of diapause is signaled by rising ambient temperatures and lengthening daylight hours in the spring. Once the ground temperature reaches a suitable threshold, typically around 10°C (50°F), the overwintering queen awakens and emerges. Her first priority is to forage for nectar and other liquid sugars to replenish her depleted energy reserves.
She then begins the “founding stage” of the new colony, selecting a new, protected location and constructing a small, initial nest of only a few cells. The queen performs all necessary tasks alone: building the nest, laying the first batch of eggs, and feeding the resulting larvae with captured protein. Once this first generation of sterile female workers hatches, they take over foraging, nest expansion, and brood care. This allows the founding queen to dedicate herself exclusively to laying eggs, restarting the annual cycle.