northeast-flora-and-fauna

This is the 4th main yellowjacket species in my area and is also a native species. It's the Eastern Yellowjacket . (The other yellowjackets around here include the native Southern Yellowjacket , the (non-yellow, non-hornet) Bald-faced Hornet , and the invasive German Yellowjacket .) If you think Southern Yellowjackets are jerks, the Eastern Yellowjackets would probably agree with you. A common tactic used by Southern Yellowjacket queens when starting a new colony is to enter an existing Eastern Yellowjacket colony, attack (and if everything goes according to the SYJ's plans) kill the EYJ's queen, and usurp her role as head of the colony. This is called facultative social parasitism . (I'm assuming the existing EYJ workers don't realize they're now working for a queen of another species.) The EYJ, SYJ, and GYJ are all considered ground yellowjackets due to their normal preference to nesting in the ground (unlike their BFH cousins who are considered aerial yellow...

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 ...

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...