European hornet
The European hornet is the biggest wasp in Europe that lives in a family. It has a brown and yellow striped body, reddish wings and eyes shaped like the letter C. It builds a paper nest from chewed-up wood.
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Fun facts
It makes paper by chewing dead bark and plants and mixing them with its spit.
Its nest walls even contain tiny bits of soil from around the nest.
It is the only true hornet that lives wild in North America. People brought it there from Europe around 1840.
Workers are about 25 millimetres long, and queens can reach 35 millimetres.
Most asked questions about European hornet
?What does the European hornet eat?
Mostly big insects, plus fallen fruit and other sugary food.
?How big is a European hornet?
Workers are about 25 millimetres long and queens up to 35 millimetres.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Vespa crabro
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
Where the facts come from
- European hornet (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 Filippo Turetta. 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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