Eastern yellowjacket
The eastern yellowjacket is a wasp with bright black and yellow stripes. It lives in big families of hundreds or thousands, usually in a paper nest hidden under the ground. It guards its home fiercely.
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Fun facts
Its nest is made of paper that the wasps make by chewing old wood and mixing it with spit.
A big nest can have 10,000 to 15,000 little rooms.
Most nests are underground, often covered by just a few centimetres of soil.
Only the queen survives the winter. In spring she starts a brand new nest all alone.
The queen is the biggest, then the males, and the workers are the smallest.
Most asked questions about Eastern yellowjacket
?Where do eastern yellowjackets build nests?
Mostly underground, but also in tree stumps, attics and walls of buildings.
?How big is an eastern yellowjacket?
About 1.3 to 1.6 centimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Vespula maculifrons
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Eastern yellow jacket
Where the facts come from
- Eastern yellowjacket (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Beatriz Moisset. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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