Wasps Life Cycle

Wasps are a parasitic type of insect family with over 10,000 species spread all over the world. The name 'Wasp' stands for any type of insect belonging to the order Hymenoptera and its suborder Apocrita. Wasps are neither ants, nor bees. The wasp life cycle is different from all other insects.

Wasps are insect predators and prey upon most of the insect species. Insects in general have a high reproductive number and frequency. If their populations are not controlled, they can cause imbalance in the ecology. So wasps play an important role in natural bio-control over the population of other insect species. So nowadays, wasps are used as natural pest control to exterminate insect pests preying on crops.

Wasps create paper pulp nets as they do not possess wax producing glands. The nature of nests built by wasps are different for each species. The wasps feed on other insects as larvae and on nectar as adults. Most of the parasitic wasps use ovipositors to lay eggs in the body of host insects, on which the larvae feed. This characteristic is found in solitary wasps mostly.The ovipositors also serve the function of delivering a venomous sting in some species. Those who have gone through the painful experience of a wasp sting will know about it! These insects can be divided into two broad types and they differ in their nesting habits:

• Social Wasps: These types of wasps live in colonies and have an advanced social structure. In advanced species only the queen is fertile while rest of the wasps in the colony are fertile. One of the most widely known social wasps are the 'Yellowjackets'. The yellowjackets are popular in the USA as mascots of many institutes of learning including Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Solitary Wasps: These wasps which include the 'Mud Daubers' and 'Pollen Wasps' are solitary and adult solitary wasps are all fertile. They do not live in colonies and build their small individual nests.

Life Cycle of Wasps

Let us see the different stages in social wasp's life cycle. The solitary wasp life cycles are too varied to be discussed here in a generic fashion. Unlike bees, wasps do not reproduce via mating flights. The reproduction involves a fertile queen and a male worker wasp who mate. The male wasp deposits his sperms in the queen wasp. These sperms are stored inside the queen wasp in the form of a tightly packed ball. They remain frozen inside her, till the next spring. Only the mated queens survive the autumn and most of the wasp colony dies. The queen survives and goes in to hibernation for winter. So let us understand the wasp's life cycle, step by step. This type of life cycle belongs to social wasps found in temperate regions.

Stage 1 - Queen Builds a Nest, Laying Eggs
The mated queens carrying sperms emerges from its hibernation in early summer. Immediately, they search a site for building their nest. Once they find one, they build a rudimentary wood fiber, walnut sized nest and lays her eggs in them.

Stage 2 - Sterile Workers are Born and Nest Expands
The eggs that are laid in this nest are fertilized one by one, using the stored sperms by the Queen. She looks over the growth of these first eggs from which sterile female worker wasps emerge. They help in building and expanding the nest around the queen. As a sufficient number of female wasps are produced, they assist and take care of the next set of eggs laid and fertilized by the queen.

Stage 3 - Fertile Male and Female Wasps are Born
As the number of wasps in the colony, who are all off springs of the queen wasp increases, the queen lays the last of her eggs, from which fertile female and male wasps are born. The fertile males move out of the nests, mate with a fertile female from another nest, and die. The mated fertile queen then goes in to hibernation with frozen sperms, to create another nest when summer come up. Thus the reproductive cycle goes on! The queen lives for a year or so before it dies. Rarely do male and female fertile wasps from the same nest mate. The queen wasps mostly choose males from other nests, promoting genetic variation.

Its amazing how these reproductive cycles of nature go on unhindered for centuries. What amazes me is that the wasps and all living creatures know what needs to be done right from the moment they are born. You do not see a wasp worker rebelling its nest colony and do something else. As if they are programmed to do their jobs and they do it! It is only humans (and very few among them too!), who can think beyond what they are biologically programmed to do.