So, what's your point? What are you asking about?

I'm guessing that zyperisis is happy to have wasps, which can be predaceous on caterpillars (and probably rose slugs) in his garden!

I would be happy too....both are benificial insects!

OH NO! NOT WASPS!
I like most insects VERY much, and I love bees, but wasps scare me.

Jeri

The thing with wasps is....if you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. Unless your eating a big piece of fried chicken at a picnic!

I have noticed a lot of wasps around my roses and was wondering if they were beneficial, harmful, or just a scary nuisance. I am learning to not run away screaming from the bees, but wasps still scare me.

jplamp, those wasps are hunting caterpillars and such things as sawfly larva! Be grateful...they are helping keep your roses beautiful.

It makes me VERY happy to see wasps hunting. I do not much care for being stung, though. It's been a few years.

Years ago, I remember as a young girl of sixteen drinking a soda pop, minding my own business at a picnic... Well a huge yellowjacket landed splat on my fingers and started crawling all! over my fingers for like 7 minutes! now seven minutes doesn't seem like eternity but it sure felt like it. I could feel its stinger dragging along as it explored every nook and cranny of my fingers... It was not a fun experience but I kept as still as I could until finally!!!! it flew off. But then again, I've never run screeching from anything in my life (LOL!) even with haunted houses and rollercoasters, heheh! otherwise I'm pretty sure I would have been like my Mom... who does screech and has been stung plenty of times...

Yes..I am happy to have seen wasps because they eat bad guys on my roses. I am on a journey in my garden to embrace nature and not try to kill everything with chemicals. Hey guys..never in my life have I been stung by a bee or a wasp! I am scared for sure of being stung.

Last year I went into a industrial park..I am in sales and wanted to eat my lunch. I parked in the shade behind a few suites and ate and took a nap. I woke up and realized there was a HUGE Hornet nest hanging out of a tree. Large black and white hornets. Scary..I looked it up and this is what they were:

http://www.cirrusimage.com/Bald-faced_hornet.htm

You can have all my wasps! They are the ONLY thing that will run me out of my rose beds! Even if they are beneficial, which I am trying VERY MUCH to appreciate, I still wish they would all go away! (Bees - a different story. I like bees. Wasps are just mean!)

Shelly

There are THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of species of "wasps".

You know something?

THE VAST, VAST, VAST MAJORITY OF THOSE "WASPS" ARE SO SMALL THEIR STINGERS (IF THEY HAVE THEM, NOT ALL WASPS DO) ARE SO SMALL THEY ARE INCAPABLE OF PIERCING HUMAN SKIN, EVEN IF THEY WERE TO WONT TO DO SO.

The HUGE majority of "wasps" are predators of specific insects, where they lay their eggs in the insects, which then hatch and eat out those insect pests from the inside.

Yes, it's a weird, and to us brutal, savage, way to live a life, but we aren't predators in the way that most wasps are, either.

The (relatively few) wasp species that are sometimes/often a problem to us (at picnics, or otherwise)? Those wasps are usually "yellow jackets". {{gwi:288454}} are a collection of a few species of hornets, the most aggressive of the wasps. They don't usually pay much attention to our foods until mid/late summer. But by then their usual food supply (the larvae from their own colonies who secrete sugary liquids that the adults eat for energy) has diminished as the queen of the colony/hive has slowed down in her egg laying. Thus there are not as many larvae around producing all those sugar secretions for the benefit of their adult sisters. Since those adults are still hungry they go searching for other sources of sugar (which they convert to energy just like we do).

That's why you see yellow jackets hanging around trash cans and empty cans of Coke in August, September, & October.

Those adult workers are still hungry, and they are still searching for sources of energy, just like the rest of us are.

Oh, by the way. If you live next to a couple of peach trees that your neighbor never properly prunes and never properly harvests during late summer?

STAY OUT OF YOUR NEIGHBOR'S YARD DURING LATE SUMMER WHEN THE PEACHES ARE FALLING OFF THOSE TREES!

Trust me. I SPEAK FROM EXPERIENCE! :-)

I am scared for sure of being stung.

I've been stung by some sort of mud dauber wasp.

It hurts.

However, unless you are allergic to the sting, it's not going to threaten your life.

Nor is it going to force you to acknowledge anything beyond the well known fact that being stung by a wasp is an unpleasant experience.

Usually when a wasp species stings something much larger than it itself it isn't intended to be an experience that threatens the life of the much larger organism, rather it's intended to be an experience that makes the larger organism much more "gun shy" about messing with the wasp in any way.

(Of course, some people are allergic to being stung by wasps. That sort of sensitivity is an auto-immune reaction to the body's direct experience of certain sorts of alien proteins such as those found in wasp venom. People whose bodies are that reactive to such venom must seek medical assistance immediately upon being stung.)

Bald-faced Hornets hurt the WORST of any sting I have ever had! But I think yellow-jackets are the most aggressive.

Wasps usually aren't aggressive if you encounter them as they work the rose bed for food. You almost have to catch one in your hand to get stung. The single sting is annoying or painful, but not a real problem for most of us.

The horror stories you hear about wasps and bees almost always involve someone messing with their hive or nest. Yellow Jackets are the notorious members of the group because their nest is invisible to us, just a small hole in the ground. You don't know its there until 50 angry hornets are flying up your pants leg and delivering multiple stings each. Yes, they can fly all the way up! This goes beyond annoying.

I speak from experience. Ooooooooooooooooooouch!

Green, I must admit I was freaked out when I saw those bald faced hornets.

Now I know why yellow jackets are so onery here in the fall.

Once I was in Texas..there were these large hornets/wasps that were so big..like the size of my baby finger..I asked what they were and they told me..but fortunately they are very timid..I guess they are so ugly they scare all their predators.

Here's a big wasp for you....Tarantula Wasp.

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:288455}}

york rose, I hear you about the peach trees! When I was a child we had a large peach tree in our yard. We always harvested and canned the peaches, but some would inevitably drop to the ground and begin to rot. One time when I was about 6 I made the awful mistake of running under the peach tree in my bare feet. I must have had 100 stings by the time I got out of there. It was an experience I'll never forget, hence my life-long fear of them.

Someone told me yesterday that the wasps are also hanging around the roses looking for water. I've noticed that they show up more when I am watering. Is that true?

Some yellow jackets are important scavengers, and I don't begrudge them that particular duty. I leave their nests alone as long as they aren't in my garden. I used to be wary of them because I've been stung. They are notorious locally for chasing people whose scent they catch. They also frequent my hummingbird feeders and make it hard to service them.

Then I got a high-tech fly swatter made of superlimber plastic, with triangular mesh in a radiating pattern, roughly 6 x 8 inches with a short handle. It's not electric or racket shaped, and I can't find any mention of it online anymore -maybe it's a patent infringement or was bought and killed by the competition. Anyway, even I can swat insects out of the air with it. In the case of yellow jackets, I observed that a couple of well-placed strokes near a hunting yellow jacket with this swatter, and they leave pronto, whereas if you swat at them with your hand or something fixed, they chase and sting. The battlefield has been leveled.

I also noticed last year that many of their nests had been dug up around my place by a nocturnal predator, I'm guessing raccoon or skunk. Whatever is after them digs up their nests as night and eats their larvae and ruins their nests. We had fewer yellow jacket encounters than I can remember last season, and I'm seeing their nests dug up again. The cost has been one 3AM dog skunking.

We had some bald faced hornets build a nest in a young dogwood tree about hip-height off the ground right near the edge of our lawn. We practiced "don't bother us, and we won't bother you." They never were particulary threatening, even when we mowed the grass close to them. It was really fascinating to watch them build the nest. They seemed to follow regular flight paths, and if we got in their way they'd fly up to us, look annoyed, then go around. The nest had grown to be little bit bigger than a football when we got up one morning and it was gone except for a tiny bit still stuck to the tree. We found other bits and pieces scattered around the yard--must have been a raccoon looking for some tasty grubs is all we can figure. There were still a few wasps left who tried half-heartedly to rebuild the nest from the remains, but they were gone in a couple of weeks.

We also had a yellow jacket nest get in a gap in the siding above our back door. They would zoom above your head while you went in and out. Fortunatley the lifecycle for them in this part of the world is to only nest for one season. By the end of fall they were gone, and we patched up the gap. Western yellow jackets are not as aggressive as the ones in the southeast, or we might have called an exterminator.

With both these nests and all the wasps visiting the flowers in the yard, I've only been stung once since I've lived here. I was just out of the shower and smelling of soap, and one of the little beasties had to check out that good smell and flew up my pants leg. When he found out he was trapped, I got stung. Perfectly understandable from his point of view.

Sometimes having the wasps and hornets check you out is a little unnerving, because the sting does hurt, but they are such beneficials that we try to leave them alone if at all possible.

Wasps will come to water in the garden. Maybe these are mud-daubers.

I'm an old guy, but I've never been stuck by a wasp except for yellow jackets. There is no reason to fear the ordinary wasps unless you are attacking the nest of paper wasps. They are around me in the garden all season.

The yellow jackets here are so aggressive in the fall that they will just fly up and sting you for no reason. I've experienced this twice, both times in October. The workers are going to die soon, and apparently the best thing they can do to help the family at that point is to go around reminding everybody else that yellow jackets are real badasses.

As a 12-year old, I accidentally disturbed a nest and got dozens of stings. As Harry says, they get inside your clothes.

Michael your post was very entertaining. Badasses indeed. The only time I have been stung since being in our current home was a few years ago by a yellow jacket. I found it in the shed and being a giant chicken I dropped everything and headed right back into the yard. This yellow jacket gave chase, literally, across the back yard and ended up giving me a painful sting. I give them a wide berth now except when we find a nest and my husband has very kindly taken the job of destroying those.

Kate