Eastern Yellowjacket – Vespula maculifrons

Live adult yellowjackets photographed in the wild at DuPage County, Illinois. Size: 12mm

These yellowjackets are famous for their fondness for soda cans at picnics: many people are extremely fearful of swallowing one that has crawled into their drink. Hint – if you supply only diet beverages, drinks containing no sugar, these critters will not bother you at least as far as canned liquids are concerned. I have, however, watched them eat salami sticking out the side of my lunchtime sandwich, and they love fruit as well.

Yellowjackets nest in the ground. I found this very busy nest entrance in a crack between flagstones in a forest preserve picnic pavilion. Very handy for easy access to the potato salad and other goodies to which  they seem implacably attracted. The sterile worker females were issuing forth at regular intervals, and I estimate there were at least dozens of individuals out marauding in support of the colony.

We had a dreadful drought in 2005, and it seemed a boon to these very prolific insects. For all their other faults, the yellowjackets are important pollinators of many flowering plants. In this age of the honey bee decline and decline in hymenopteran numbers generally, plants need all the help they can get. Nevertheless, these little bastards can pump alarm pheromones at an alarming rate when their nest in under attack, attracting fresh recruits to the fray. And they will sting you if you are within a 20 or 30-foot radius. As many times as they like.

One hot summer day long ago, my dad asked me to eradicate a nest right next to his back door and I (very reluctantly) agreed. A can of Raid flying insect spray later, my dad and I had both been stung multiple times, and those yellowjackets were VERY riled up defending their nest.  Don’t try this at home, kids. Yellowjackets don’t have barbs on their stingers like honeybees. They’ll grab onto your clothing and just keep stinging you until you get the picture and swat them to the ground – and it takes a healthy swat, too, kinda like deer flies. The stings were very painful, too, and itched and burned for days afterwards.

Oh, and the yellowjackets just kept coming back from the field, and the Raid killed many of them but did not penetrate the nest. So our little exercise was for naught. The nest lived on and prospered for the rest of the summer.

January 22,2023
Note: These words were written by a very real human being, Bruce Marlin. Editor and photographer. Everything was researched by hand. All photographs were taken by me. No AI was used in producing this page. Except no substitutes. (In response to ChatGPT which has everyone in an uproar these days lol.)

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