Do cold winters affect wasps?
Every winter as soon as we get a bit of snow or a few frosts, the same old conversation appears on the various pest control forums. As sure as the grit Lorries will be hard at it, you can bet the same phrase which makes me smile "it will be a bad wasp year" will posted somewhere.So I thought I would jot down my thoughts on this matter and perhaps generate some conversation.
If hard cold winters affected hibernating queen wasps, you could be fairly confident at placing a bet with Ladbrokes that: Siberia won't have any wasps in the summer. Right?
In fact you would lose your bet. Siberia does have wasps and they manage to hibernate in minus forty degree temperatures without freezing to death. So our relatively mild winters are not about to knock off the hibernating queens, or are they?
I would argue that mild winters are more detrimental to hibernating queen wasps than cold winters are. If we have a normal winter with stable temperatures through till January or February then we have a period of milder temperatures which does happen from time to time, our hibernating queens start to come out of hibernation as if it were spring (late March, early April), these wide awake queen wasps will have no food to sustain them and will starve to death.
Queen wasps that have just emerged from hibernation need to feed on a nectar type food (like all adult wasps do) which in the spring is readily available, however in January or February there is no nectar flow from any plants.
To conclude, I would argue that cold winters produce the maximum amount of queen wasps emerging from hibernation at the right time of year.
Mild winters will see a high percentage of queens perish do to starvation as they emerge at the wrong time. Blog menu