Yellowjackets are predatory social wasps belonging to the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula, often mistaken for bees or other types of hornets due to their vivid black and yellow markings. Like many social insects, a yellowjacket colony is built around a single reproductive female, meaning they definitively have a queen. The queen is substantially larger than her offspring, often measuring around three-quarters of an inch long, and she alone is responsible for initiating the entire colony from scratch.
The Annual Nature of the Yellowjacket Colony
The existence of a yellowjacket colony is temporary, dictated entirely by seasonal temperatures. Unlike honeybees, which maintain a perennial colony, the yellowjacket nest is strictly annual. As cold weather arrives, the founding queen, all sterile female workers, and the male drones die off, leaving the nest to decompose. Only the newly fertilized queens, produced late in the season, survive the winter. These mated females scatter to find sheltered places to enter a state of dormancy, ensuring the entire social structure must be rebuilt every spring.
The Queen’s Solitary Spring Start
The survival of the species relies on the success of the queen during her solitary spring phase. Emerging from diapause in April or early May, the queen must first forage on nectar and tree sap to replenish her energy reserves before locating a suitable nesting site. She often chooses a protected cavity, such as an abandoned rodent burrow, a hollow log, or a void in a structure. She chews wood fibers and mixes them with saliva to create a small, golf-ball-sized paper envelope containing 30 to 50 hexagonal brood cells.
Within these initial cells, the queen lays her first clutch of eggs. Once they hatch, she shifts her focus to being a diligent caretaker, actively hunting for small insects and scavenged meat. She chews this protein-rich diet to feed the developing larvae. After approximately 18 to 20 days, these larvae pupate and emerge as the first generation of sterile worker wasps, typically around mid-June.
The emergence of these workers marks the end of the queen’s solitary effort. Her sole duty for the remainder of the summer becomes egg-laying. The workers take over all foraging, building, and defense duties.
How New Queens are Created
The colony transitions from a maintenance phase to a reproductive phase as the population peaks in late summer or early fall, often reaching 4,000 to 5,000 workers. Workers begin constructing specialized, larger cells within the nest to accommodate the next generation of reproductives. The queen lays eggs in these cells that will develop into fertile females and males (drones). These larvae receive a richer food supply than the worker larvae, a difference in nutrition that triggers their development into new queens rather than sterile workers.
Once the new queens and males mature, they leave the parent colony to engage in a mating flight. The males die shortly after mating, while the newly fertilized queens immediately seek a secure, insulated location to spend the winter. As the weather cools and the reproductive cycle concludes, the original founding queen, the remaining workers, and any unmated males rapidly decline and perish.