Wasp season 2013 predictions

Looking into my glass ball, I am going to brave enough to make an early prediction for the upcoming wasp season.

With the 2012 wasp season being so poor for our vespula friends thus a bad year for pest controllers, I can almost see faces hung low in despair that they may face yet another terrible year. My friends, I shall bestow faith on you and you shall be healed.

There has been some chatter about lack of queens last autumn leading to another bad year. Now this may have some bearing on the coming season but I do not think it will be as bad as some believe. Although there was a noticeable reduction of nests last summer, there will have been a huge amount that went unnoticed or ignored, partially due to the small size of the nests last year.

We are two weeks or so away (at time of writing) from the first flowers of the season, I can see them starting to push through now. The forecast is for cold weather for the next couple of weeks and I can almost relax with a breath of relief. If those queens can stay in hibernation for just a little bit longer we shall be home and dry. The winter has been a good wasp hibernation winter; staying cold.

So on reflection, I am predicting a reasonable wasp summer, not a superb busy one, but an average one. Of course this all depends on what the spring does. Let us all pray to the wasp gods that we do not have torrential rain through the spring like last year.

Edit (mid April): Due to the unusually long winter and nonexistent spring I am editing this post to reflect the recent weather patterns.
Queen wasps should have emerged in March if the weather had been normal, but here we are mid April and it is still cold and no real sign of spring has arrived. If queens are only just starting to emerge from hibernation now, then I feel that we can expect a later start than normal as queens starting nest building late. My expectations at the present are for nests to be a month behind normal. Blog menu