Yellow jackets (Vespula species) are social wasps whose colonies have a defined structure. In a typical yellow jacket colony throughout the active season, only one fertile female, the founding queen, is responsible for all egg-laying and reproduction. This single-queen structure, known as monogyny, is the standard for annual yellow jacket nests in temperate regions. However, the exact number of queens in a nest can change dramatically depending on the time of year and is subject to exceptions.
The Role of the Founding Queen
The colony’s life begins in the spring when a single, fertilized queen emerges from her overwintering site to start a new nest. This founding queen performs a challenging period of solo labor, constructing a small nest from chewed wood fiber and raising the first brood of offspring entirely on her own. She is the central, sole reproductive female, defining the colony for much of its lifespan.
Once the first generation of sterile female workers emerges, typically around June, the queen’s role shifts exclusively to reproduction. She becomes “nest-bound,” no longer foraging or building, and dedicates herself to laying eggs to rapidly expand the colony’s size. This division of labor allows a typical colony to swell to thousands of workers by late summer, all produced by the single founding queen.
The queen maintains her reproductive dominance through pheromonal and behavioral control over the workers. This suppression prevents the sterile workers from developing their own ovaries and laying eggs. Her physical presence and chemical signals ensure that she remains the only fertile egg-layer in the nest for the majority of the season.
The Annual Cycle of Queen Production
The number of queens changes as the colony approaches the end of its annual cycle in late summer and early fall. After months of producing sterile workers, the queen switches to laying eggs that will develop into the next generation of reproductive individuals: males (drones) and new, fertile females, known as gynes.
The timing of this shift is crucial, as the new gynes must mate and disperse before the nest dies off with the onset of cold weather. These new queens are raised in specialized, larger cells within the comb and may number from a few hundred to over a thousand in a healthy, mature colony. The males and gynes emerge and leave the nest to mate with individuals from other colonies, ensuring genetic diversity.
Once the new queens have left to find hibernation sites, the original founding queen’s life cycle concludes. She ceases egg-laying, and the remaining workers, no longer receiving the sugary secretions from the larvae, begin to starve and die. Only the newly mated gynes survive the winter to start the process again the following spring.
When Multiple Queens Appear
The presence of multiple queens is generally a temporary phenomenon or an exception to the annual cycle. The most common instance of a nest containing multiple queens is during the late fall reproductive phase, when the founding queen is still present alongside hundreds of newly emerged gynes that have yet to disperse. Their presence is fleeting, as they leave the nest soon after mating to hibernate alone.
However, complexity arises in certain species, particularly the German Yellow Jacket (Vespula germanica), and in warmer climates where colonies can survive for more than one season, becoming perennial. In these cases, the colony can become truly polygynous, meaning multiple fertile, egg-laying queens co-exist and reproduce within the same nest. This shift occurs where the absence of a harsh winter allows the nest to persist.
Perennial and polygynous nests can grow to enormous sizes, sometimes containing thousands of queens and hundreds of thousands of cells. This scale is rarely observed in annual colonies. The colony’s social organization changes in response to favorable environmental conditions, allowing multiple queens to join and contribute to the colony’s exceptional growth.