A castle made of paper – our wasps‘ nest.

What you see here is an artistic structure made of a kind of paper: the construction of a wasp colony.

Wasps

There are about 750 species of wasps in our country. Distinctive for some are the yellow-black stripes, which already warn visually of the poisonous sting of the insects.

Most wasps live alone as solitary wasps, thus do not form states and do not build „paper castles“. Some field wasps live in earth caves and other shelters.

A well-known species of wasps, due to their very large size, are hornets.

The German wasp and the common wasp have a bad reputation as cake robbers and pests in summer. They are probably the ones we think of first. But all wasps are beneficial insects, as they eat smaller pests and pollinate flowers.

 

The wasp, its people and its castle

In spring, a queen wasp begins to build a small nest ball with a few cells and lays eggs inside. Her new colony grows larger and larger, and the young worker wasps (up to 10,000 wasps are possible in some species) help enlarge the nest. In hot summers, the structures can reach an astonishing size, depending on local conditions.

„Dark Cave Nister“ and „Free Hanger

The red wasp, the German wasp and the common wasp are „dark cave nisters„. This is in contrast to the „free-hangers“ which hang their nests freely from a small stalk in trees, attics, etc. Upon closer inspection, these nests can be distinguished by the air pockets that the wasps attach as an insulating outer shell. In dark cave nests, these are semicircular, resembling a scale pattern. In free-hangers, these are tubular, giving the nests a cross-striped appearance.

Building material wood

Wasps build their castles out of wood (which is why we included this exhibit in LIGNOAMA). To do this, they need rotten, dry wood, which they chew into pellets to make a kind of paper.

From the color it is possible to estimate who built the paper castle. Hornets and common wasps use rotten wood from decaying trees, and their nests are light beige in color.

All other species use superficially weathered wood. This can be recently dead trees, but also wooden fences, gates and doors. Anything made of wood. Since the wasps collect the softer parts from the wood, these often appear highly textured. The collecting activity is well observed on old painted wooden houses, gates, etc. If there is paint on the wood, the wasps cannot reach the wood. Wood fibers have been collected in open areas, and the surface is clearly deepened. Nests made of this relatively new wood are like our exhibit of gray color.

 

 

In our wasp nest, the outer shell has already been partially lost. Thus, the individual honeycombs are clearly visible. The honeycomb shape results from the even pull that the honeycombs exert on each other. 

Sources: WIKIPEDIA, Reinhold Hackl oral, Dr. Claire Stürzer (entomologist).