3 Defining Stages in the Life Cycle of Wasps

Wasps are a parasitic type of insect family, with over 10,000 species spread all over the world. The name stands for any type of insect belonging to the order Hymenoptera and its suborder Apocrita. These insects are neither ants nor bees. Their life cycle is different from all other insects.

Wasps are insect predators and prey upon most other insect species. Insects, in general, have a high reproductive number and frequency. If their populations are not controlled, they can cause an imbalance in the ecology. That is why wasps play an important role in natural bio-control over the population of other insect species. Nowadays they are also used as natural pest control to exterminate pests that prey on crops.

Wasps create paper pulp nests because they do not possess wax-producing glands. The type of nest varies between species. As larvae, wasps feed on other insects; as adults, they feed on nectar. Most parasitic wasps use ovipositors to lay eggs inside the bodies of host insects, on which the larvae then feed. This characteristic is mostly found in solitary species. The ovipositor also delivers a venomous sting in some species, anyone who has been stung by a wasp will know exactly what that feels like.

Social and Solitary: Two Very Different Lifestyles

Wasps can be divided into two broad types that differ in their nesting habits:

• Social Wasps: These types live in colonies and have an advanced social structure. In advanced species, only the queen is fertile, while the rest of the wasps in the colony are infertile. One of the most widely known types is the Yellowjacket. Yellowjackets are popular in the USA as mascots of many institutes of learning, including Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Solitary Wasps: These include the Mud Daubers and Pollen Wasps. Adult solitary wasps are all fertile. They do not live in colonies and instead build their own small individual nests.

The Life Cycle

The solitary wasp's life cycle is too varied to discuss here in a generic way. Instead, let us look at the different stages in a social wasp's life cycle. Unlike bees, wasps do not reproduce via mating flights. Reproduction involves a fertile queen and a male worker wasp who mate. The male deposits his sperm inside the queen wasp. These sperm are stored inside her in the form of a tightly-packed ball. They remain frozen inside her until the next spring.

Only the mated queens survive the autumn, and most of the colony dies. The queen survives by going into hibernation for winter. Here is how the life cycle of social wasps found in temperate regions plays out.

Stage 1, Queen Builds a Nest and Lays Eggs

The mated queen, carrying stored sperm, emerges from hibernation in early summer. She immediately searches for a site to build a nest. Once she finds one, she builds a small, rudimentary wood fiber nest roughly the size of a walnut and lays her first eggs inside it.

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Stage 2, Sterile Workers Are Born and the Nest Expands

The eggs laid in this nest are fertilized one by one using the queen's stored sperm. She watches over the growth of these first eggs, from which sterile female worker wasps hatch. The workers help build and expand the nest around the queen. Once enough female workers are present, they take over caring for the next batch of eggs that the queen continues to lay and fertilize.

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Stage 3, Fertile Males and Females Are Born

As the number of wasps in the colony grows (all offspring of the queen) she lays the last of her eggs, from which fertile females and males hatch. The fertile males leave the nest, mate with a fertile female from a different nest, and then die. The newly mated fertile queen goes into hibernation carrying frozen sperm, ready to start a new nest the following summer. In this way, the reproductive cycle continues. The queen lives for a year or so before she dies.

Male and fertile females from the same nest rarely mate. Queen wasps mostly choose males from other nests, which promotes genetic variation.

It is amazing how these reproductive cycles of nature continue unhindered for centuries. Every living creature seems to know what needs to be done from the moment it is born. You never see a worker wasp abandoning its colony to do something else. They are programmed to carry out their roles, and they do. It is only humans, and very few among them at that, who can think beyond what they are biologically programmed to do.