Southern Yellowjacket

In yesterday's post on a German Yellowjacket, I was surprised I hadn't done posts on out native yellowjackets [1]. Let's correct that with some older pictures. Today's picture is of a Southern Yellowjacket.

Though perhaps hard to see (especially if you're in the act of running from them) there are clear differences between these 2 yellowjackets. The abdomen of the German is mostly yellow, and the yellow has little black spots on it. The Southern has an abdomen that's approximately 50-50 between black and yellow.

Southern Yellowjacket nests frequently start in a way that's detrimental to other wasps like the Eastern Yellowjacket. In the spring a Southern queen will usually, instead of starting a nest from scratch, invade the nest of Eastern Yellowjackets, kill the Eastern Queen, and essentially become the new queen of the Eastern Yellowjacket nest.

Another somewhat unusual thing about the Southern Yellowjacket is that sometimes nests will have more than 1 queen, typically resulting in larger nests populated with more yellowjackets.

October 7, 2019 at Duke Farms
Photo 53696474, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] Or maybe I did. A little over a year ago Tumblr oddly decided I was violating some standard that they wouldn't explain, and when I left their platform all my old posts evaporated into cyberspace.

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