Animal · Germany, France, Poland
European hornet
Vespa crabro — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The European hornet is the largest wasp in Europe, a brown and yellow insect whose queens can reach 35 millimetres. Despite its size it is a shy animal that stings only when somebody comes too close to the nest.
Picture credit: Katya (CC BY-SA 2.0) · H. Zell (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Jerzy Strzelecki (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the European hornet live?
Home: Old woodland, orchards and parks with hollow trees.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, Poland, Austria, Czechia, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States.
The short profile
Fully grown: queens up to 35 mm, workers about 25 mm. It weighs about 0 001 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A hornet colony starts each spring with a single queen who has survived the winter alone. She chews rotten wood into a paper pulp and builds the first few cells of a nest, usually inside a hollow tree, a barn wall or a nest box. Her first daughters take over the building work, and by late summer several hundred workers may live in the nest. Hornets hunt flies, beetles and other wasps, chew them up and feed them to the grubs, while the adults themselves live mostly on tree sap and fallen fruit. Unlike most wasps they also fly after dark and are drawn to lighted windows. When the first frosts come the whole colony dies, and only the young queens crawl into a crack in the bark to wait for spring.
Find it on the globe
European hornet 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
Is a European hornet dangerous?
Its sting hurts, but the venom is no stronger than that of a common wasp. A hornet only stings to defend the nest, so the sensible thing is to keep a few steps away and not swat at it.
What do European hornets eat?
Adult hornets drink tree sap and the juice of fallen fruit. They hunt flies, beetles and other wasps not for themselves but for the grubs in the nest, which are fed on chewed insect meat.
Why do hornets fly at night?
Most wasps stop flying at dusk, but hornets keep hunting after dark, when moths and beetles are on the wing. Like those insects they are drawn to light, which is why one sometimes bumps against a lighted window.
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.
Last checked: