Nearly all social wasps, such as yellow jackets and hornets, die in the winter. Unlike honeybees, these species do not maintain their colonies year-round. The vast majority of the colony—the workers, males, and the old queen—perish as the weather turns cold, leaving only the newly fertilized queens to endure the season and continue the species.
The Annual Cycle of Social Wasps
The yearly life cycle begins in the spring when a single, mated queen emerges from her winter shelter to establish a new colony. She selects a nesting site and constructs a small paper nest by chewing wood fibers mixed with saliva. Initially, the queen performs all duties: foraging, building the nest, and laying the first batch of eggs.
The first eggs hatch into sterile female workers, who rapidly take over tasks like expanding the nest and gathering food for the queen and developing larvae. Throughout the summer, the colony population explodes, sometimes containing thousands of worker wasps. The colony’s focus then shifts from producing workers to creating new reproductive individuals: males and future queens.
The Mass Die-Off
As autumn progresses, the colony enters a phase of disintegration. The founding queen stops laying eggs, ending the supply of larvae that secrete a sugary substance workers eat. This loss of internal food exchange triggers the colony’s decline.
Without their primary source of sustenance, worker wasps forage for external sugary foods. Dropping temperatures immobilize the workers and males, who lack the physiological capacity to survive the cold. The original queen also dies, leaving the nest abandoned by the onset of winter.
How the Queen Survives Winter
The only individuals that survive this seasonal collapse are the new, fertilized female wasps. These queens accumulate substantial fat reserves during late summer, sometimes making up 40% of their dry weight. This stored energy serves as their sole source of sustenance and allows them to enter diapause, a state of metabolic suppression.
During diapause, the queen’s metabolism slows. Her body prepares for freezing temperatures by producing a substance like glycerol to prevent ice crystals from forming inside her cells. She seeks sheltered locations for dormancy, such as under tree bark, in hollow logs, or within wall voids and attics of human structures. When spring returns, she emerges to begin the cycle anew, provided she survived starvation or predation while dormant.
Solitary Wasps and Other Species
While social wasps follow the annual cycle of colony death and queen survival, the life cycle of solitary wasp species is different. Solitary wasps, such as mud daubers and potter wasps, do not form colonies or have sterile workers. The adult female lives for only a few weeks, constructing individual cells, provisioning each with paralyzed prey, and laying a single egg before sealing the cell.
In these species, the offspring, not the adult, survives the winter. The larva develops inside its protected cell, often made of mud or located underground, and enters a dormant stage as a pre-pupa or pupa. The adult solitary wasp dies after its reproductive duties are finished, and the new generation emerges as fully formed adults the following spring.