The Buzz About Paper Wasps

Common paper wasp (Polistes spp.)
Photo:  Russ Ottens, Univ. of Georgia

The cooling weather will soon bring an end to activity for Polistes or paper wasp colonies. There are

several species of paper wasps, but the common ones are brown in color with yellow stripes on their abdomens. The workers (who will die soon), along with next year's crop of queens, are starting to bail out of their nests. The surviving queens will seek out some place to pass the winter. All too often our houses, and other structures, become the location of choice.

You may begin seeing wasps outdoors hovering about the eaves and soffits on warm afternoons. At some point, the wasps may make their way indoors, and things can get more exciting. The wasps are often seeing moving about slowly and bouncing off windows, ceilings, light fixtures, etc. Cold weather seems to stop the activity, but quite likely on subsequent warm days you will find wasps flying about indoors or again spot them outside around the roof area.

A few things to keep in mind:

First - seeing the wasps does not mean that there is a nest in a wall; however, there may be a nest outdoors on a roof overhang, under a porch, in/on a tree or some other protected area.

Second - since these are queens looking for overwintering sites and not workers defending a nest, they are not aggressive and so stinging incidents are rare unless you have a "close encounter of the Polistes kind," such as I had when I laced up my running shoe one morning only to discover that a wasp had crawled inside there during the night.

Third - spraying indoors is an exercise in futility because there simply isn't a specific target area you can treat. Spraying the exterior of the building also has limited value because there are so many gaps accessible to the wasps.

Best advice: keep a rolled-up newspaper handy. Be patient; let the wasp land then smack it.

For further information about paper wasps, check out:

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Other/note144/note144.html

http://insects.ncsu.edu/Urban/paperwasp.htm