The Queen wasp will hibernate over the winter and will emerge as the warmer weather approaches during the early spring.
She will find a suitable nesting site commonly in your loft, shed or under roof tiles.
The Queen will start to remove wood from fence panels and sheds mixing it with her saliva creating a perfect building material for her nest. Her nest will be the size of a golf ball like in the picture shown.
It is common to find many wasp nests of this size in the loft that have died due to predation from spiders before the nest has finished forming.
Once the golf ball sized nest is complete she will then add a small amount of cells to it allowing her to lay her first batch of eggs which she will feed on insects.
After a few weeks the wasp grubs will turn into adult worker wasps taking over the construction of the nest allowing the queen to solely reproduce.
It is thought the queen can produce between 50-100 eggs per day.
This picture shows three stages of the nest. From the small golf ball sized nest the queen starts to a medium sized nest. On the left is a fully grown nest after it has been treated. This nest can contain up to 15,000 wasps.
Towards the end of each wasp season the queen will lay her final batch of eggs which are the queens and male (drone) wasps. Each nest can produce around 1200 but most will die during the winter.
Once they have hatched they will leave the nest to breed but will not breed with male (drone) wasps from their own nest.
When the breeding process is complete the male wasps will die off and the new queens will fly off looking for a suitable place to hibernate until the following spring arrives.
Then in the following spring the process starts all over again.
Click on the link to compare the difference between a wasp and a honey bee or click here for more on our treatments.