What happened to the wasps this summer?
Posted on 11th September 2024 at 16:37
What happened to the wasps this summer?
Where were all the wasps this summer? That was a question I kept on hearing and reading all summer long, what happened to the wasps. Well, there’s an easy answer to that – it was down to bad weather.
When it comes to the news, either what’s in it or who’s making it, everyone these days is an expert, the lack of wasps has been subject to thoughts on the widespread use of pesticides, global warming, Asian hornets, you name it and its been raised as the reason for the lack of wasps.
Blame it on the rain!
But what else have we missed this year? Good weather that’s what! Travel back in time to February and March, the weather was pretty grim in Maidenhead at that time, nearly every day was wet and cold. We had some warm days mixed in with the rain and that combined with longer daylight is the trigger to bring insects out of their winter sleep.
Most Queen wasps emerge through March and April and start building their nests, as many of these are built in hedges, trees and shrubs, even underground, this means that they are susceptible to bad weather. In fact, back in April we had 55% more rain than usual, and this is what has accounted for the lack of wasps.
Wasps 0 - Hornets 1
When Queen wasps from winter statis (insects don’t truly hibernate) they are hungry and just in need of a period of warm weather to give them and their prey a period to take on food and get the nest started. Once that nest reaches a critical point, she will stay inside and just lay eggs for the workers to attend to, this year, they emerged to a world that was cold, wet and very miserable, many of the Queen wasps simply died.
We have seen plenty of active nests this year that have been built inside brick structures and many more callouts to deal with hornets this year, you may find that the hornets which tend to start building a little later than wasps, usually a bit further on in the year during May, and they either got lucky with a warmer dry spell or as I suspect, just had less competition without all the wasps being about, but hornets have done very well.
Total wasp control in Maidenhead
Its been a relatively cool summer this year and when the kids were off school the weather certainly wasn’t great, I would suspect that the surviving wasps have gone unnoticed because people just haven’t been using their gardens enough to spot them. So next year will be business as usual if we get a warmer and drier spring; some of the comments on the lack of wasps mention climate change. I’ve seen this pattern where you get four or five good years of wasps and then a really poor year.
The lack of wasps this year is just down to a cold wet spring, and nothing more, it’s not uncommon given our weather systems and they’ll bounce back next year. Going back to global warming, it does seem that overall, our background temperatures both in the summer and the winter are steadily climbing, what this means for the entire wasp and hornet species is unclear, and it’s thought that without a true cold winter, there would be no need for any insects to shelter, so that means the wasps could survive all year long and become a constant active presence.
Tagged as: Wasps
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