German Yellowjacket

If you think yellowjackets are ill-tempered normally, you should see them before they've had their morning coffee. 😀 This wasp (all yellowjackets are wasps) appears to be a German Yellowjacket. These insects invaded the northeast in the 1970s and have spread out from there. 

Though they are both pollinators and eaters of pest insects, as invaders they don't truly add value to our ecosystem. Nothing beneficial they do is an improvement on what our own wasps were doing, and in some cases they probably throw an ecosystem a little off balance by being an imperfect replacement for native wasps they're outcompeting. I suspect though that their similarity to native wasps means they're not the worst actors on the invasive scene.

This is usually considered to be a species that nests in the ground over in its original European home, but here in the US it's more likely to build (sometimes huge) nests inside human built structures. (I wonder if there's something they like about European soil or dislike about North American soil that inspires this nesting preference change.)

November 8, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 169043488, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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