Where did all the wasps go this summer? Looking back over the past few months, its certainly been a strange summer and one question that I kept on hearing was “What happened to the wasps”? There’s a really easy answer to the question and the answer is that it was just down to bad weather in the spring. 

 

We’re living in what’s called the Information Age and one thing that you notice is that when it comes to the news, and what’s in it or who’s making it, everyone is an expert. Whether its been on the mainstream news or on social media, the lack of wasps has been subject to thoughts and conspiracies regarding the widespread use of pesticides, global warming, Asian hornets, pollution, you name it and its been raised as the reason for the lack of wasps this summer. 

 

But what else has been missing this year? That’s good weather that’s what! Travel back to February and March, and the weather was pretty grim, nearly every day saw wet and cold weather. We had a few warm days mixed in with the rain and together with longer daylight hours and a warming after the cold from winter, the natural trigger operated and bought many insects out into a cold, wet and hostile environment. 

 

 

Most Queen wasps will emerge through the months of March and April and immediately begin nest building and raising the colony, as many of these nests are built in hedges, trees and shrubs, and even underground, this means that these Queens are incredibly susceptible to bad weather. In fact, April saw around 55% more rain than usual, and this poor weather is what has accounted for the lack of wasps. 

 

When Queen wasps emerge from their period of winter stasis (insects don’t hibernate) they are starving and vulnerable, they need a period of settled, warm weather to give them and their prey a period to take on food and begin breeding or laying eggs. Once she has built up enough of a worker population, she will stay inside the nest and take on an egg laying role to really get the colony off to a successful start, however, this year, these wasps emerged to a cold, wet and very miserable world, where many of the Queen wasps simply died off before they could get the colony going. 

 

It’s not been all bad, we have seen plenty of active wasp nests this year that have been built inside brick structures and for some reason, more callouts to deal with hornets this year, the reason for that is, hornets tend to start building their nests a little later than wasps, usually a bit further on in the year during May when its warmer. This year they either got lucky emerging into a warmer dry spell or as I suspect, with less wasps about, they had less competition. 

 

 

So, what would happen next year if we’ve had so few wasps? I suspect that this year’s weather won’t be repeated and spring 2025 will be typical in that it’s warm with dry spells that will allow the Queens to get established. We will see this type of pattern from time to time, global warming is an established trend where we are seeing rising temperatures and different patterns of rain. The suggestion is that with higher temperatures we will see more moisture in the atmosphere so longer wetter periods like the spring we just had, and heavier, intense rainfall which we’ve experienced through this summer. 

 

Wasps will adapt and as the winters become less intense we will see species from the Mediterranean migrant to our shores and we may end up seeing wasp activity cycle all year long.