Guinea paper wasp
The Guinea paper wasp builds its nest out of paper that it makes itself. It is a slim wasp with yellow or pale markings and dark purple-tinted wings. It lives in a family with one queen and many helpers.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
It chews wood fibres from posts and plant stems and turns them into paper for its nest.
The nest is an open comb of six-sided rooms with no paper cover around it. Big nests have about 500 rooms.
In most nests only one queen lays all the eggs. The older a wasp is, the more important it is in the family.
Its feelers are striped red, black and yellow, while most paper wasps have feelers of just one colour.
It likes to build its nest on houses, sheds and other things people make, in bright open spots.
Most asked questions about Guinea paper wasp
?How does a paper wasp make paper?
It chews wood from posts and plant stems and mixes it into a soft pulp that dries like paper.
?Where do Guinea paper wasps build nests?
Often on or near buildings, in bright and open places.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Polistes exclamans
- Named by
- Viereck, 1906
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Polistes exclamans (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 Melissa McMasters from Memphis, TN, United States. CC BY 2.0, 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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