Animal · Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland
Common wasp
Vespula vulgaris — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common wasp is the black-and-yellow visitor at your picnic table, and she is a hunter who carries flies and caterpillars home to her grubs. Her nest is made of paper chewed from old wood.
Picture credit: pjt56 (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Bernd Trommer (CC BY 4.0) · Kinetic2352 (CC0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common wasp live?
Home: gardens, woodland edges and roof spaces.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Poland, New Zealand, Australia.
The short profile
Fully grown: 12–17 mm (workers). It weighs about 0 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Everything starts in spring with one single queen who slept through the winter in a crack. She chews old wood into a grey paper pulp and builds the first twenty or thirty cells entirely by herself. Her first daughters then take over the building and the hunting, and by late summer several thousand wasps can live in the nest. All summer long they catch flies, caterpillars and greenfly, which quietly helps gardens and fields. The grown wasps themselves live on sugar: nectar, tree sap and ripe fruit, which is why they turn up at a jam sandwich in August. People often mistake them for honeybees, but a bee is furry, browner and round, while a wasp is smooth, glossy and pinched in at the waist. In autumn the whole colony dies and only young queens live on to start again.
Find it on the globe
Common wasp is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How do I tell a wasp from a honeybee?
A worker wasp is 12 to 17 mm long, smooth and shiny, with sharp black and yellow bands and a very thin waist. A honeybee is about the same length but furry, browner, rounder and much less bright.
Where does a common wasp build its nest?
In dark, dry cavities: old mouse holes, hollow trees, roof spaces and garden sheds. The species lives right across Europe and Asia and has been carried to New Zealand and Australia, where it causes real trouble.
Are wasps actually useful?
Very much so. One large nest carries thousands of insects home over a summer and keeps caterpillars and flies in check, and the adults also visit flowers and move pollen while they drink nectar.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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