When I first saw them coming out of hole number one, I thought they were wasps because they appeared, from a distance, to have smooth bodies and narrowish waists. But I poked around on the Internet to try to figure out more accurately what they might be, and based on a document I found from what I thought would be a reliable academic resource, I found no confirmation that there were similarly sized social, ground-nesting wasps in Michigan. In fact, the information led me to believe, to my surprise, that these were most likely bumblebees; that the queen was large and the fliers we saw were workers, much smaller than the queen.
Jim's comment on my previous text made me rethink this, and I now think I have determined that they are indeed a wasp. It has also made me think that, as a someone who is supposed to have a background in biology, I ought to be able to identify the little buggers. I am, in fact, somewhat embarrassed to have been so quickly convinced that they were bees. Of course, at that time I hadn't been able to get a close look at them. I have looked now more closely at the photos I took, and I have ruled out any possibility that they are any sort of bee. I have also ruled out the German yellow jacket based on the markings on their bodies. The German yellow jacket probably could have been ruled out based on the fact that I haven't been stung by any of them! That leaves two possibilities: they are most likely the common wasp (Vespula vulgaris), but they might be the Eastern yellow jacket (Vespula maculifrons). In fact, some of what I've found leads me to believe that this is a classification difference, and that some entomologists consider the eastern and western yellow jackets a single species, the common wasp, while others like to keep them separate. I'll see what else I can learn.
I'm also going to send Quinn and Abbey out there catch some so that I can examine them more closely.
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I vote yellowjackets, but I have no idea which nationality. I've seen ground-nesting bees in wooded areas around here, but I don't think they're social. Instead, they seems to be a bunch of individual neighbors. Yellowjackets, on the other hand, are very, maybe way too, common around here. I was out on the deck last fall and noticed a lot of them going in and out of a small hole in a mortar joint in exterior wall, about where the masonry party wall falls between our rowhouse and our neighbor's. Our houses are masonry, not studs, a bonded construction with an inner wythe of concrete block and and outer wythe of brick. So I figured they must have found a way into the cavities of the concrete blocks, maybe in the party wall. I asked the neighbor if she'd seen any in the house, and she said she seen quite a few "bees" around the windows, as though they were trying to get out. She said she was frightened because she was allergic to them so we called a guy who happens to be a beekeeper but also specializes in removing other types of stinging insect colonies. He doesn't kill the bees, obviously, but he exterminated our yellowjackets by putting poison into the little hole. I might have left them alone, since the colony usually dies out, except for the queen, over the winter, but I had read horrible accounts of giant yellowjacket colonies that survive the winter within warmer house walls only to one day explode into the house. Eeeek. Sounded like a horror movie in the making. I'm pretty tolerant of most insects--we've had a spider living under our toilet tank (his website) for the past couple weeks and we throw the occasional ant his way--but yellowjackets freak me out, especially the way the carry chunks of food away, even meat.
ReplyDeleteI, too, vote yellow jackets, and I don't give a darn about their nationality.
ReplyDeleteThe only bees I know that nest in the ground are bumble bees, but they are solitary. I've uncovered them in the garden and usually move them aside, or let the sun warm them up and the fly off on their own.
Yellow jackets commonly live in or on the ground. They will hollow out a cavity in soft soil or the woodland duff on top of the soil. They are very aggressive. Have a picnic with sweets or meats and they swarm in for a share. Step on their nest and they attack - I got my first sting when I stepped on a nest in a bed of ivy. I got stung on a hike once, as did another hiker in another group, and I think the nest, off the trail, had been disturbed by a dog bounding around in the brush.
There's a very effective way to get rid of them without poisons, but you will now have to wait until next year. Get one or more of those traps that are clear, yellowish cylinders with a cone-like element inside and an attractant in the bottom. But if you put it out now, you will only catch workers, hundreds of them, and the queen keeps pumping out more. Our first summer here, I put them out in early summer and completely filled them with dead workers several times. The trick is catching the queen.
As Yowie says, colonies generally die out each winter, except new born queens. Queens are produced in the fall, go out and mate, and build their own new nest in the ground. The colony that hatched them die out, including the old queen. Next spring, the queen wakes up and starts laying eggs. But because she is alone, she also has to forage for food. This is the time to put out the traps. Once she has adult workers, she'll never leave the nest again. Every queen you trap is a whole colony that won't happen. The trick is knowing when the queens come out of hibernation in your area.
Like I said, the first summer, I only trapped workers, by the hundreds. Next spring, I trapped several queens. There were still nests in the neighborhood but the numbers harassing our picnics was down 90%. By the third year, I caught one or two queens and we saw no workers at all during the summer. This year, I caught probably half a dozen queens, and have still not seen any workers during the summer.